We have sought it in heaven, (an instance is meant,) but with equal propriety and success we might seek it in--matrimony. For what but a sugared fallacy is that Honeymoon so universally accepted as consequent on every marriage--as being a mingling of the sweetness of Hybla with all the soft suffusion of love which lapped Endymion on the hill of Latmos, to be enjoyed in all cases and without limit during the space of one calendar month--for twenty-eight days at least; except in leap-year. At which time, even February days are twenty-nine. A fond conceit! It is wrong to argue everyday life from the privileges of the aristocracy; and only in connection with marriages strictly of convenience does the honeymoon roll through its successive phases with propriety, going out as the monthly bills come in. Careful computation of the laws of accident prove the full average honeymoon to subsist about four days and a half, except in cases where youth, fortune, and fine weather combine with affection, when the average may possibly be doubled. So that wife Sybilla ought to have been much more content than in fact she was, that her matrimonial orb waned not before the expiration of a week; considering that though they were rich enough in youth, they possessed neither fortune nor particularly fine weather. It was, however, this very consideration of lack of fortune, in the sense of money, that caused Sybilla first to descend from out the luxuriant solitudes of love in which, hand in hand, they had sauntered all the week, bringing her husband quickly after her. The initiatory cause of the declension was a nightcap; for after a protracted evening sitting at an open window, Sybilla woke the next morning to find, not the locks of Hyperion straying over the pillow beside her, as before, but a tall, tasseled, miserable white cap, which, encroaching over Godwin’s eyes, elongated his cheeks and exaggerated his nose to a most unhandsome degree. The unconscious sleeper, experiencing symptoms of cold in the head the night before, had ventured, in the dark, to assume that wretchedest of all habiliments, the male nightcap. When the blossom is ripest, the softest breath may waft it from the bough; in the nodding of that green tassel moved a cruel blast sufficient to scatter the full-blown poetry of any week-grown honeymoon. Accordingly, before breakfast was fairly over, Sybilla remembered that very little business had occurred to interrupt their happiness--before dinner, that Mr. Godwin had paid several bills with undisguisable uneasiness; and, as the result of such souvenirs, not only she but Godwin also sat down at supper that night to a diluted cup, broken-winged and very near the earth. Every day nearer and nearer the earth, for things did not take a turn, but grew worse; and though they had the certainty of aunt’s legacy before them, Godwin soon began to fear almost as much as his wife that if, according to the doggrel of Keats,