MY DEAR JEREMY,—Do you ever think of our boarding-school loves, and wonder where all those bright eyes, which used to blaze as from a battery upon us from that pyramid of laughing faces, rising one above the other to the topmost pane of those ample windows, are weeping or laughing now? Do you promenade on the west side, as of yore, without a sigh, and gaze into those deserted windows, from which smiles and rose-tinted notes were showered down upon us with such munificence, without a thought of the fair hands and glad hearts which then gave a sort of sunlight to our devotion—the Mecca to which we turned in our morning prayers and evening rambles? Is it not a sad thought, that as we journey through life, the very innocency of boyhood, the first fresh feelings of the heart, are things of which it is conventional to be ashamed? As if it were a happiness, which we should call a conquest, to learn the bitter lessons of life, at a sacrifice of all the fond recollections of youth, a triumph to know the secret of deceiving with smiles, and of wringing the hand kindly, of people we despise. Yet must we learn the uses of adversity by time, and feel that the brightest of _our_ days are passed forever; that hope, having cheated us for a thousand times, has become bankrupt in our esteem, while the past, brilliant and certain in joys experienced, recalls with the flitting present, doubts of true happiness for us again. It is a stern lesson—that which experience teaches us as we advance in years, to live a life of distrust and doubt, to believe all goodness assumed, and friendship but a cheat; to think that every man’s hand is either raised against his brother, or is thrust into his pocket, and that there is no such thing as self-sacrifice, except among the Hindoos. But, Jeremy, not to speak of instances, all of which must be as fresh to your memory as to mine, I come back to the first question—do you ever think of our boarding-school loves? and mingle with the remembrance those unexpressed hopes and fears which flutter in the hearts of all of us. My falcon towered above yours in ambition then; nothing less than a mistress of rhetoric and _belles_ letters tempted the magnificent swoop of my poetry and ambition; yours had a fierce and Byronic generality, which made it dangerous for the whole covey of lesser birds. How many were you in love with, _Jeremy_? At least, how many were made goddesses by your poetry? “You decline,” under present circumstances matrimonial. Well, a man with a growing family, I suppose, owes something to appearances and to example. I have no such excuse to plead, and can be as open as the day.