Graham's Magazine, Vol. XX, No. 6, June 1842Various
Science
Graham's Magazine, Vol. XX, No. 6, June 1842
Various
Literature -- Periodicals; Literature, Modern -- 19th century -- Periodicals
That day I saw her no more. But her agony of mind could not have been
greater than my own. There is no feeling more acute to a sensitive mind
than the consciousness that we are beloved by one whom we esteem, but
whose affection it is impossible for us to requite. Oh! the bitter
torture to reflect that by this inability to return another’s love, we
are inflicting on them the sharpest of all disappointments, and perhaps
embittering their life. Point me out a being who is callous to such a
feeling, and I will point you out a wretch who is unworthy of the name
of man. He who can triumph in the petty vanity of being loved by one for
whom he entertains no return of affection, is worse than a fop or a
fool—he is a scoundrel of the worst stamp. He deserves that his home
should be uncheered by a WOMAN’S smiles, that his dying hour should be a
stranger to her tender care. God knows! to her we are indebted for all
the richest blessings and holiest emotions of our life. While we
remember that we drank in our life from a mother’s breast—that we owed
that life a thousand times afterwards to a mother’s care—that the love
of a sister or the deeper affection of a wife has cheered us through
many a dark hour of despair, we can never join that flippant school
which makes light of a woman’s truth, or follow those impious revilers
who would sneer at a woman’s love. The green sod grows to-day over many
a lovely, fragile being, who might still have been living but for the
perfidy of our sex. There is no fiction in the oft-told story of a
broken heart. It is, perhaps, a consumption that finally destroys the
victim, but alas! the barb that infused the poison first into the frame
was—a hopeless love. How many fair faces have paled, how many hearts
have grown cold, how many seraphic forms have passed, like angel
visitants, from the earth, and few have known the secret of the blight
that so mysteriously and suddenly withered them away. Alas! there is
scarcely a village churchyard in the land, in which some broken hearted
one does not sleep all forgotten in her lonely bed. The grave is a
melancholy home; but it has hope for the distressed: there, at least,
the weary are at rest.
It is years since I have visited the grave of Ellen, and I never think
of her fate without tears coming into my eyes.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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