inspiration of the other! What a world of reasonings, not immediately
obvious, did the sage of old open to our inquiry, when he said the
pathetic was the truest part of the sublime. Aristides, the painter,
created a picture in which an infant is represented sucking a mother
wounded to the death, who, even in that agony, strives to prevent the
child from injuring itself by imbibing the blood mingled with the milk.
[Note: Intelligitur sentire mater et timere, ne mortuo lacte sanguinem
lambat.] How many emotions, that might have made us permanently wiser and
better, have we lost in losing that picture!

Certainly, Love assumes a more touching and earnest semblance, when we
find it in some retired and sequestered hollow of the world; when it is
not mixed up with the daily frivolities and petty emotions of which a
life passed in cities is so necessarily composed: we cannot but believe
it a deeper and a more absorbing passion: perhaps we are not always right
in the belief.

Had one of that order of angels to whom a knowledge of the future, or the
seraphic penetration into the hidden heart of man is forbidden, stayed
his wings over the lovely valley in which the main scene of our history
has been cast, no spectacle might have seemed to him more appropriate to
that lovely spot, or more elevated in the character of its tenderness
above the fierce and short-lived passions of the ordinary world, than the
love that existed between Madeline and her betrothed. Their natures
seemed so suited to each other! the solemn and undiurnal mood of the one
was reflected back in hues so gentle, and yet so faithful, from the
purer, but scarce less thoughtful character of the other! Their
sympathies ran through the same channel, and mingled in a common fount;
and whatever was dark and troubled in the breast of Aram, was now
suffered not to appear. Since his return, his mood was brighter and more