bilities of the heart, hallowing by its sweet presence the grossness of instinct, and shedding a softened hue over every object that it embraces, as the sun beautifies the deformities of nature.

"There is no life on earth," says Ben Jonson, "but being in love." It is the golden chain let down from heaven to link us to the Godhead. It strengthens the arm of the toil-worn cottager, converts his couch of straw into a bed of down, wakes him with the lark, sings him to sleep with the nightingale, and refreshes him in the hour of repose with sweet glimpses of future happiness. Love, properly speaking-is the heir-loom of youth an estate entailed upon minority, to be resigned when the owner has reached the years of discretion. It is the romance of life, when the blood runs riot in the veins, and the imagination is peopled with chimeras. It is the ignis-fatuus of the senses, that lures them to the Slough of Despond. It is like the small-pox, for a man never has it a second time.

I was once in love myself-not soberly attached, but downright mad. My friends feared for my senses, as well they might; and even now there are times when the recollections of the past, though linked with folly, are almost enough to unman me. The girl I loved was graceful in

mind and person, and was adored with the disinterested fervor of that passion, which once dead can never be revived. She was all to me-wherever she moved, music floated on the gale, flowers sprung up beneath her feet. Her looks, her words, her smiles, those sweet episodes in the history of affection, were each noted down in the tablets of. memory, "unmixed with baser matter." Those times are gone: lives, but no more for me; she is wiser, I am older, and so the matter rests between us. But can I ever forget the past? No! in the hour of gloom, when remembrance is most alive, "there comes a voice that awakens my soul, it is the voice of years that are gone, they roll before me with all their might." The form of treads once more the moon-lit sands, once more a golden radiance hangs over the vista of the future, music lingers on each breeze, and the rainbow of promise on each cloud.*

We seldom find love connected with learning; a circumstance which may speak volumes either in its disparagement or praise. There may be two reasons assigned for this. The one is, that know

Poets, they say, succeed better in fiction than in truth: the reader may, if he pleases, extend the same privilege to the writer of this Essay.

ledge, though it sharpens the intellect, deadens the more sensitive faculties of the soul, and has the same effect upon love, that mathematics have upon poetry. The other consists in its giving too abstracted a notion of woman, which reality is sure to disappoint. I remember a young man, of high intellectual attainments, telling me that he would never marry till he could meet either with Milton's Eve, or Virgil's Dido. The great Sir Isaac Newton among other sublime discoveries, once attempted the experimental philosophy of love: but, like many other literary characters, his theory of woman was too abstracted, and he found her the most difficult problem he ever solved. His biographers indeed, relate that he lost the affections of his betrothed, by applying her taper fingers to the profane purpose of a tobacco-stopper.

Rousseau, on the contrary, was a glorious exception among literary men, that learning may sometimes co-exist with intensest passion. Madame de Warrennes was La Nouvelle Héloïse, the goddess of his idolatry. Amid the glooms of a morbid temperament, her form was ever present, and shone the rainbow of promise, to which his mind turned for consolation. He heard her voice breathing in every whisper of the gale, her spirit haunted the mountains, mingled with the mellow twilight, and

pervaded, like some sweet influence, the rocks of Meillerie. This was impassioned love; and though philosophers have stamped it as a weakness, who ever thinks of accusing Rousseau? The ladies, I am sure, would never be guilty of such rudeness.

I have spoken of love hitherto with regard to an individual who treated it as a refined poetic passion; with the generality it is a matter of pounds, shillings, and pence. "When the poet," says a writer in the New Monthly Magazine, “calls his mistress heavenly-minded, the prudent worldling says she is a good match; and while the impassioned bard murmurs some words about the mind, the music breathing from the face,' our man of the mart is coolly calculating £5000 three per cents. now, and something more when the old fellow dies." Love, then, as it exists in the world, is a gross union of desire with interest. Its shafts are resistless, for they are tipped with gold. It has a thousand charms; but then they consist in the fertility of an estate, and are amalgamated with a settlement. "Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not a rent-roll, (which is precisely my case,) I am as sounding brass or a tinkling cymbal." Money, in short, in this as in every other instance, is the universal Panacea.

The commercial propensities of England have in

part produced this utter degradation of sentiment. By referring every thing to riches as to a first cause, they have thrown into the back-ground the finer and more susceptible feelings. They have cast down the altars of Love, and erected a statue to Mammon on the ruins. The times are no more when merry England, was the garden of chivalry, and passion was the instinct of the heart. The times are no more when Shakspeare's Juliet was both felt and understood, or when Calantha in the Broken Heart found an echo in the applauding soul of woman. The times are no more, when youths and maidens met beneath the broad beechen tree, when the lover played his madrigals beneath the moon-lit casement of his fair, without dread of censure or of blame. We have become a factitious nation of artifice and cant. Commerce has impoverished our sensibilities, and Love, whose highpriest is Henry Hase, esq., has but one temple erected to his honor-in the Bank, which is fed with oblations from the three per cents. We have lost, besides, our golden simplicity; like some old stock-broker, we are too knowing to be taken in, and pay too many taxes to be able to pay proper attention to the blind god. "When poverty comes in at the door, love flies out at the window." A mournful truism, which bids fair to condemn modern agriculturists to perpetual celibacy.