Since the love itself is wrecked, let me gather up its relics, and guard them more tenderly, more steadily, more gratefully. This seems to open up glimpses of peace. O grant me power to retain them--the light and music of emotion, the flow of domestic wisdom and chastened mirth, the life-long watchfulness of benevolence, the thousand thoughts--are these gone in their reality? Must I forget them as others forget? If I were to see _my_ departed one--that insensible, wasted form--standing before me as it was wont to stand, with whom would I exchange my joy?... But it is not possible to lose all. The shadows of the past may have as great power as their substance ever had, and the spirit of human love may ever be nigh, invested with a majesty worthy to succeed the lustre of its mortal days. This is the poem of Harriet Martineau's love. This is what remains to show that the girl whose intellect was so powerful, and who had habitually and of choice exercised her mind upon the most abstruse studies and the most difficult thoughts which can engage the attention, could nevertheless feel at least as fervently, and deliver herself up to her emotions at least as fully, as any feeble, ignorant, or narrow-minded creature that ever lived. Surely, with the truth emphasized by such an example, the common but stupid delusion that the development of the intellect diminishes the capacity for passion and tenderness, must fade away! This girl's mental power and her mental culture were both unusually large; but here is the core of her heart, and is it not verily womanly? This experience did more than give her hours of happiness; it did more than bring to her that enlargement of the spirit which she so well described; for it taught her to appreciate, and to properly value, the influence of the emotions in life. Never in one of her works, never in a single phrase, is she found guilty of that blasphemy against the individual affections, into which some who have yet sought to pose as high priests of the religion of humanity have fallen and lost themselves. In all her writings one finds the continual recognition of the great truth which was in the mind of him who said: "If a man love not his brother whom he hath seen, how shall he love God whom he hath not seen?"--a truth of the very first consequence to those who aim at expressing their religion by service to the progress of mankind. The year 1826, to Harriet crowded so full of trouble, came to an end soon after Mr. Worthington's death. In the following year, though she was in very bad health, she wrote a vast quantity of manuscript. Some of it was published at once. Other portions waited in her desk for a couple of years, when her contributions to _The Monthly Repository_ recommenced, after a change in its editorship.