her see, as see she could not avoid, in connection with that chivalrous
homage which at any rate was due to her sex and her sexual perfections,
a love for herself on my part, which was in its nature as exalted a
passion and as profoundly rooted as any merely human affection can ever
yet have been.

On the seventeenth birthday of Agnes we were married. Oh! calendar of
everlasting months--months that, like the mighty rivers, shall flow on
for ever, immortal as thou, Nile, or Danube, Euphrates, or St.
Lawrence! and ye, summer and winter, day and night, wherefore do you
bring round continually your signs, and seasons, and revolving hours,
that still point and barb the anguish of local recollections, telling
me of this and that celestial morning that never shall return, and of
too blessed expectations, travelling like yourselves through a heavenly
zodiac of changes, till at once and for ever they sank into the grave!
Often do I think of seeking for some quiet cell either in the Tropics
or in Arctic latitudes, where the changes of the year, and the external
signs corresponding to them, express themselves by no features like
those in which the same seasons are invested under our temperate
climes: so that, if knowing, we cannot at least feel the identity of
their revolutions. We were married, I have said, on the birthday--the
seventeenth birthday--of Agnes; and pretty nearly on her eighteenth it
was that she placed me at the summit of my happiness, whilst for
herself she thus completed the circle of her relations to this life's
duties, by presenting me with a son. Of this child, knowing how
wearisome to strangers is the fond exultation of parents, I shall
simply say, that he inherited his mother's beauty; the same touching
loveliness and innocence of expression, the same chiselled nose, mouth,
and chin, the same exquisite auburn hair. In many other features, not
of person merely, but also of mind and manners, as they gradually began