"HE WILL NOT SEPARATE US, WE HAVE BEEN SO HAPPY." "To veer how vain! on, onward strain, Brave barks! in light, in darkness too; Through winds and tides one compass guides, To that, and your own selves, be true. But, O blithe breeze! and O great seas, Though ne'er that earliest parting past On your wide plain they join again, Together lead them home at last. One port, methought, alike they sought, One purpose hold where'er they fare. O bounding breeze, O rushing seas! At last, at last unite them there!"--_Clough._ "He will not separate us, we have been so happy"--these were the last words of Charlotte Brontë when, having become Mrs. Nicholls, and having lived with her husband only nine months, death came to snatch the cup of domestic felicity from the lips of the happy pair. A low wandering delirium came on. Wakening for an instant from this stupor, she saw her husband's woe-worn face, and caught the sound of some murmured words of prayer that God would spare her. "Oh!" she whispered, "I am not going to die, am I? He will not separate us, we have been so happy." Mrs. Elizabeth Fry, when a girl, loved her family so dearly that she used to wish that when they had to die, two large walls might press towards each other, and crush them all, that they might die all together, and be spared the misery of parting. Loving husbands and wives will sympathize with this wish, for they must sometimes look forward with dread to the misery of parting from each other. "To know, to esteem, to love--and then to part, Makes up life's tale to many a feeling heart!" In all ages the anticipation and the reality of separation has been the greatest and sometimes the only sorrow in the lot of united couples. Many very touching inscriptions have been found in the Catacombs at Rome, but none more touching than those which record this separation. Here is one of them. It is in memory of a very young wife, who must have been married when little more than a child (fourteen), and then left by her husband, a soldier, called off probably to serve in the provinces. He returns to find his poor little wife dead. Was she martyred or did she fret herself to death, or was she carried off with malaria in the Catacombs? We know nothing; but here is her epitaph full of simple pathos, and warm as with the very life blood: "To Domina, 375 A.D., my sweetest and most innocent wife, who lived sixteen years and four months, and was married two years, with whom I was not able to live more than six months, during which time I showed her my love as I felt it; none else so loved each other." When Sir Albert Morton died, his wife's grief was such that she shortly followed him, and was laid by his side. Wotton's two lines on the event have been celebrated as containing a volume in seventeen words: "He first deceased; she for a little tried To live without him, liked it not, and died."