“The fashions which you used to lead, So careless are you or so thrifty, You most neglect when most you need; A sad mistake, when nearly fifty.” “Stop! stop!” says Body, “let us pause, Before you reckon more offences; Since you yourself may be the cause Of all these dismal consequences. “The sword, you know, wears out the sheath; By steam are broken vessels scatter’d; And when volcanos rage beneath, The surface must be torn and scatter’d. “Have not your passions, hopes, and fears, Their tegument of clay outwearing, Done infinitely more than years To cause the ravage you’re declaring? “If you yourself no symptom show Of age--no wrinkles of the spirit; If still for friends your heart can glow, Your purse be shared with starving merit; “If yet, to sordid sins unknown, No avarice in your heart has started; If you have not suspicious grown, Sour, garrulous, or narrow hearted; “You still are young! and o’er my face, (Howe’er its features may be shaded) Shall throw the sunshine of your grace, And keep the moral part unfaded. “Expression is the face’s soul, Of head and heart the emanation; Insensible to time’s control, Free from the Body’s devastation. “If you’re still twenty, I’m no more: Counting by _years_, how folks have blunder’d; Voltaire was young at eighty-four, And Fontenelle, at near a hundred!” ❦ [Sidenote: Love.] All that has been written in song, or told in story, of love and its effects, falls far short of its reality. Its evils and its blessings, its impotence and its power, its sin and its holiness, its weakness and its strength, will continue the theme of nature and of art, until the great pulse of the universe is stilled. Arising from the depths of misery, descending from heaven the most direct and evident manifestation of a divine and self-sacrificing spirit, it is at once the tyrant and the slave. Happier as the latter than as the former, for the perfection of love is obedience; the power of obeying what we love is, at all events, the perfection of a woman’s happiness. ❦ [Sidenote: Wedding Rings.] The wedding ring was not at first of gold, but of iron adorned with an adamant; the metal hard and durable, signifying the durance and perpetuity of the contract. Howbeit, it skilleth not at this day what metal the ring be made of; the form of it being round and without end, doth import that love should circulate and flow continually. The finger on which the ring is to be worn, is the fourth finger of the left hand, next unto the little finger, because there was supposed a vein of blood to pass from thence unto the heart. ❦ _Impromptu in a Post-chaise, on seeing some Boys playing at See-saw._