earthly friend; and the reprobate beneath the world's dread stigma, involving in wretchedness and ruin, would find no faithful hand to lift the pall of public disgrace, and reclaim the lost one from a living death. But more than all, without pity, we should want the bright opening in the heavens through which the radiance of returning peace shines forth upon the tears of penitence-we should want the ark of shelter when the waters of the deluge were gathering around us-we should want the cloud by day, and the pillar of fire by night to guide our wanderings through the wilder

ness.

The grief arising from pity is the only disinterested grief we are capable of; and therefore it carries a balm along with it, which imparts something of enjoyment to the excitement it creates; but for its acuteness of sensation, we have the warrant of the deep workings of more violent passions, which pity has not unfrequently the power to overcome. History affords no stronger proof of this, than when Coriolanus yielded to the tears of his mother, and the matrons of Rome, what he had refused to the entreaties of his friends, and the claims of his country.

But if pity connected with the power of alleviating misery is mingled with enjoyment, pity without this power is one of the most agonizing of our griefs. To live amongst the oppressed without being able to break their bonds-amongst the poor without the means of giving-to walk by the side of the feeble without a hand to help-to hear the cries of the innocent without a voice to speak of peace, are trials to the heart, and to the will, unparalleled in the register of grief. And it is this acuteness of sensation, connected with the unbounded influence of pity, and the circumstance of its being woven in with the chain of kindness, and love, and charity, by which human suffering is connected with human virtue, that constitutes the poetry of grief in its character of pity-a character so sacred, that we trace it not only through the links of human fellowship, binding together the dependent children of earth; but also through God's government, up to the source of all our mercies, where separate from its mortal mixture of pain, pity performs its holy offices of mercy and forgiveness.

71

THE POETRY OF WOMAN.

AFTER What has already been said of love and grief, we feel that to treat at large upon the poetry of woman, must be in some measure to recapitulate what forms the substance of the two preceding chapters; because, from the peculiar nature and tendency of woman's character, love and grief may be said to constitute the chief elements of her existence. That she is preserved from the overwhelming influence of grief, so frequently recurring, by the reaction of her own buoyant and vivacious spirit, by the fertility of her imagination in multiplying means of happiness, and by her facility in adapting herself to place and time, and laying hold of every support which surrounding circumstances afford, she has solely to thank the Author of her life, who has so regulated the

balance of human joys and sorrows, that none are necessarily entirely and irremediably wretched. On glancing superficially at the general aspect of society, all women, and all men who see and speak impartially, would pronounce the weaker sex to be doomed to more than an equal share of suffering; but happily for woman, her internal resources are such as to raise her at least to a level with man in the scale of happiness. Bodily weakness and liability to illness, is one of the most obvious reasons why woman is looked upon as an object of compassion. Scarcely a day passes in which she has not some ache or pain that would drive a man melancholy, and yet how quietly she rests her throbbing temples; how cheerfully she converses with every one around her, thus beguiling her thoughts from her own sufferings; how patiently she resigns herself to the old accustomed chair, as if chained to the very hearth-stone; while the birds are warbling forth their welcome to returning spring, and she knows that the opening flowers are scenting the fresh gales that play around the garden where she may not tread, and that the sunny skies are lighting up the landscape with a beauty which she may not look upon-it is

possible, which she never may behold again. Yet what is all this to woman? Her happiness is not in physical enjoyment, but in love and faith. Give her but the voice of kindness-the pure, sweet, natural music of the feminine soul, to soothe her daily anguish-to cheer her nightly vigil, and she will ask no more: tell her of the green hills, the verdant woods, and the silver streams, of the song of the birds, and the frolic of the lambs, of nature's radiant beauty glowing beneath a cloudless sky, and of the universal gladness diffused through the animal creation-tell her all this, in which she has, personally, no participation, and she will be satisfied, nay, blest.

In the natural delicacy of woman's constitution, however, we see only one of the slightest of the causes of suffering peculiar to her character and station in society; because her feelings are so entirely relative and dependent, that they can never be wholly, or even half absorbed by that which is confined to her own experience, without reference to that of others. There are unquestionably many exceptions to this rule, but the rule is the same notwithstanding; and I desire to be understood to speak not of women individually, but of the