“You have but a week. But, have you no reluctance? Is there nothing that you regret to leave? Speak freely, Julia. Your mother, your friends--would you not prefer to remain with them?” She placed her hands on my shoulders, laid her head close to my bosom and murmured--how softly, how sweetly--in the touching language of the Scripture damsel. “Entreat me not to leave thee, or to refrain from following after thee; for whither thou goest, I will go, and where thou lodgest, I will lodge. Thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God!” I folded her with tremulous but deep joy in my embrace; and in that sweet moment of peace, I wondered that I ever should have questioned the faith of such a woman. CHAPTER XXXVII. “AND STILL THE BITTER IN THE CUP OF JOY.” Once more I had sunshine. The clouds seemed to depart as suddenly as they had risen, and that same rejoicing and rosy light which had encircled the brow of manhood at its dawn long shrouded, seemingly lost for ever, and swallowed up in darkness--came out as softly and quietly in the maturer day, as if its sweet serene had never known even momentary obscuration. Love, verily, is the purple light of youth. If it abides, blessing and blessed, with the unsophisticated heart, youth never leaves us. Gray brows make not age--the feeble step, the wrinkled visage, these indicate the progress of time, but not the passage of youth. Happy hearts keep us in perpetual spring, and the glow of childhood without its weaknesses is ours to the final limit of seventy. The sense of desolation, the pang of denial, the baffled hope, and the defrauded love, these constitute the only age that should ever give the heart a pang. I can fancy a good man advancing through all the mortal stages from seventeen to seventy-five, and crowned by the sympathies of corresponsive affections, simply going on from youth to youth, ending at last in youth's perfect immortality! The hope of this--not so much a hope as an instinct--is the faith of our boyhood. The boy, as the father of the man, transmits this hope to riper years; but if the experience of the day correspond not with the promise of the dawn, how rapidly old age comes upon us! White hairs, lean cheeks, withered muscles, feeble steps, and that dull, dead feeling about the heart--that utter abandonment of cheer--which would be despair were it not for a certain blunted sensibility--a sort of drowsy indifference to all things that the day brings forth, which, as it takes from life the excitement of every passion, leaves it free from the sting of any. Yet, were not the tempest better than the calm? Who would not prefer to be driven before the treacherous hurricane of the blue gulf, than to linger midway on its shoreless waters, and behold their growing stagnation from day to day? The apathy of the passions is the most terrible form in which age makes its approaches.