that talk, though on the affairs of a hamlet, than babble again with recreant nobles and blundering professors about commonwealths and constitutions. When I want to see how little those last influence the happiness of wise men, have I not Machiavel and Thucydides? Then, by-and-by, the Parson will drop in, and we argue. He never knows when he is beaten, so the argument is everlasting. On fine days I ramble out by a winding rill with my Violante, or stroll to my friend the Squire's, and see how healthful a thing is true pleasure; and on wet days I shut myself up, and mope, perhaps, till, hark! a gentle tap at the door, and in comes Violante, with her dark eyes that shine out through reproachful tears--reproachful that I should mourn alone, while she is under my roof--so she puts her arms round me, and in five minutes all is sunshine within. What care we for your English gray clouds without? "Leave me, my dear Lord--leave me to this quiet happy passage toward old age, serener than the youth that I wasted so wildly; and guard well the secret on which my happiness depends. "Now to yourself, before I close. Of that same _yourself_ you speak too little, as of me too much. But I so well comprehend the profound melancholy that lies underneath the wild and fanciful humor with which you but suggest, as in sport, what you feel so in earnest. The laborious solitude of cities weighs on you. You are flying back to the _dolce far niente_--to friends few, but intimate; to life monotonous, but unrestrained; and even there the sense of loneliness will again seize upon you; and you do not seek, as I do, the annihilation of memory; your dead passions are turned to ghosts that haunt you, and unfit you for the living world. I see it all--I see it still, in your hurried fantastic lines, as I saw it when we two sat amidst the pines and beheld the blue lake stretched below. I troubled by the shadow of the Future, you disturbed by that of the Past. "Well, but you say, half-seriously, half in jest, 'I _will_ escape from this prison-house of memory; I will form new ties, like other men, and before it be too late; I _will_ marry--ay, but I must love--there is the difficulty'--difficulty--yes, and Heaven be thanked for it! Recall all the unhappy marriages that have come to your knowledge--pray, have not eighteen out of twenty been marriages for love? It always has been so, and it always will. Because, whenever we love deeply, we exact so much and forgive so little. Be content to find some one with whom your hearth and your honor are safe. You will grow to love what never wounds your heart--you will soon grow out of love with what must always disappoint your imagination. _Cospetto!_ I wish my Jemima had a younger sister for you. Yet it was with a deep groan that I settled myself to a--Jemima.