But then it will be said, perhaps, that the splendour and the charm which poetry has thrown over some of these pictures of conjugal affection and wedded truth, are exterior and adventitious, or, at best, short-lived:--the bands were at first graceful and flowery;--but sorrow dewed them with tears, or selfish passions sullied them, or death tore them asunder, or trampled them down. It may be so; but still I will aver that what has been, _is_:--that there is a power in the human heart which survives sorrow, passion, age, death itself. Love I esteem more strong than age, And truth more permanent than time. For happiness, _c'est different!_ and for that bright and pure and intoxicating happiness which we weave into our youthful visions, which is of such stuff as dreams are made of,--to complain that this does not last and wait upon us through life, is to complain that earth is _earth_, not heaven. It is to repine that the violet does not outlive the spring; that the rose dies upon the breast of June; that the grey evening shuts up the eye of day, and that old age quenches the glow of youth: for is not such the condition under which we exist? All I wished to prove was, that the sacred tie which binds the sexes together, which gives to man his natural refuge in the tenderness of woman, and to woman her natural protecting stay in the right reason and stronger powers of man, so far from being a chill to the imagination, as wicked wits would tell us, has its poetical side. Let us look back for a moment on the array of bright names and beautiful verse, quoted or alluded to in the preceding chapters: what is there among the mercurial poets of Charles's days, those notorious scoffers at decency and constancy, to compare with them?--Dorset and Denham, and Sedley and Suckling, and Rochester,--"the mob of gentlemen who wrote with ease,"--with their smooth emptiness, and sparkling common-places of artificial courtship, and total want of moral sentiment, have degraded, not elevated the loves they sang. Could these gallant fops rise up from their graves, and see themselves exiled with contempt from every woman's toilet, every woman's library, every woman's memory, they would choak themselves with their own periwigs, eat their laced cravats, hang themselves in their own sword-knots!--"to be discarded thence!" Turn thy complexion there, Thou simpering, smooth-lipp'd cherub, Coxcombry, Ay, there, look grim as hell! And such be the fate of all who dare profane the altar of beauty with adulterate incense! For wit is like the frail luxuriant vine, Unless to virtue's prop it join; Though it with beauteous leaves and pleasant fruit be crown'd, It lies deform'd and rotting on the ground!