And then, to mark the rising sigh, The blushing cheek, the laughing eye, In _turn_ appear; The swelling breast, the _throbbing_ there, The playful struggle--_all_ declare, “I love thee, dear.” * * * * * ’Tis sweet, when man doth contrite bow Before his God, his spirit low, And seek His favor. With deep submission as he kneels, He speaks the joy his bosom feels, “I love thee, Savior.” But sweeter far, when _God_ hath said, “The offering which _I_ have made, Thine heart hath won. Through _Him_ will I now hear thy cries, Through that ‘_atoning sacrifice_,’ ‘I love thee, _son_.’” THE COFFEE CLUB. No. II. “I wish you saw me half starting out of my chair, with what confidence, as I grasp the elbow of it, I look up, catching the idea, even sometimes before it half-way reaches me. ----I believe in my conscience I intercept many a thought, which Heaven intended for another man.”--_Tristram Shandy._ Reader; Lest, from the fact that we have hitherto drawn our mottos from “The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy,” the suspicion may be festering in your brain that poor Nescio Quod has confined his reading among the older English writers to this single work, it may not be amiss to adduce such evidence, as shall set at rest so unjust and injurious a surmise. For instance--had he wished to be sarcastical upon himself, and thus, by a common artifice, predispose his critics to clemency, he might, in reference to the multitudinous array of _shadowy_ jests--flitting around the brightness of the reader’s fancy, like moths around a candle, to their own destruction--have cited this keen retort of Fuller--“It is good to make a jest, but not to make a trade of jesting.” Or, in allusion to the somewhat pedantic display of information, varied, but worthless, he might have adopted from the same author a complaint at the frivolous attainments of the idle and riotous student--“Yet, _perchance_, he may get some _alms_ of learning, here a snap, there a piece of knowledge, but nothing to purpose.” Or, in a mood of preeminent self-complacency, he might have imagined that the reader’s feelings towards him, maugre his faults and his prolixity, might be fitly expressed in the language of the Spectator (after Martial.) “In all thy humors, whether grave or mellow, Thou’rt such a touchy, testy, pleasant fellow, Hast so much wit, and mirth, and spleen about thee, There is no living with thee, nor without thee.” Or, in defense of his desultory style--half-way between the frisking pirouettes of Harlequin, and the staid pace of the moraliser, he might have borrowed a circumlocutory sentence from the bungling Locke--“I would have him try whether he can keep one unvaried, single idea in his mind without any other, for any considerable length of time.”