Could we--as angels may be supposed to do--stand by the bed-side of many a fair girl who has been laughing through an evening of apparent merriment, and look through the fair bosom into the heart beneath, see all the feelings that thrill therein, or trace even the visions that chequer slumber, what should we behold? Alas! how strange a contrast to the beaming looks and gladsome smiles which have marked the course of the day. How often would be seen the bitter repining; the weary sickness of the heart; the calm, stern grief; the desolation; the despair--forming a black and gloomy background to the bright seeming of the hours of light. How often, in the dream, should we behold "the lost, the loved, the dead, too many, yet how few," rise up before memory in those moments, when not only the shackles and the handcuffs of the mind, imposed by the tyrant uses of society, are cast off, but also when the softer bands are loosened, which the waking spirit places upon unavailing regrets and aspirations all in vain--in those hours, when memory, and imagination, and feeling are awake, and when judgment, and reason, and resolution are all buried in slumber. Can it be well for us thus to check the expression of all the deeper feelings of the heart--to shut out all external sympathies--to lock within the prison of the heart its brightest treasures like the miser's gold, and only to give up to them the hours of solitude and of slumber?--I know not; and the question, perhaps, is a difficult one to solve: but such, however, are the general rules of society; and to its rules we are slaves and bondsmen. It was to her own chamber that Edith Croyland usually carried her griefs and memories; and even in the house of her uncle, though she was aware how deeply he loved her, she could not, or she would not, venture to speak of her sensations as they really arose.