reconstruction of the palace if the royal mind is not clothed with a dignity, a strength, a glory in unison with its high enthronement? Work, therefore, is designed to assist in preparing man for this foretold ascendency over matter. But work, by itself, can never contribute to this result. A moral spirit, which Christianity breathes into all true industry and business, must penetrate our work. It will then refine and ennoble our being; and as the "six days” of toil are tributary in God's economy to the Sabbath, so all our labor will blend with religion in purifying and exalting our nature.

MARRIED TO THE MAN OF HER
CHOICE.

victory of physical force; for it was a moral les- | recovered, the sovereign must be prepared for son, never forgotten, of where his strength lay, his empire and rule. Of what avail will be the and what unseen hands helped him. Then, too, how much he owed to his daily task-how his watchful offices over the sheep lifted his heart to the great Shepherd-how the vast heavens above him prompted the inquiry, "What is man, that Thou art mindful of him?" Had he not been a shepherd-boy, dwelling away from the haunts of men, enjoying the open freedom of nature, and living in the fellowship of beautiful or sublime scenes, he would never have felt the presence of God in the material universe, nor had that profound insight into the ways of His ever-working providence that has invested his Psalms with such a hallowed interest. In this history of David we see that even miraculous power did not disdain to recognize the use of ordinary means. herd-boy trained him for one of the grandest theatres on which man ever acted. It awakened thoughts and feelings, inspired impulses, quickened affections, that not only educated the mind of a nation, but for many centuries have proved a blessing and a joy to the most cultivated intellect, to the Christian piety of the world. Had God chosen he might have made his intellect an image-chamber of the universe by direct inspiration, and, with the quickening touch of his hand, opened all the founts of feeling to send forth sweeter and healthier waters than those which miraculously rolled their glad stream along the pathway of Israel in the desert. But there was a "more excellent way." Better for him, better for the world, that the seal of Heaven should be set on the ordinary incidents, the everyday scenes of life, and that out of these, by slow and painful strife, a soul of strength and majesty should emerge.

The simple life of a shep-FRANCES TEMPLEMAN was no ordinary child. In appearance, in manner, she differed from other children; and that difference can best be defined by a simple statement-she was never called Fanny. Readers will judge what the peculiar character of a child must be who has never known an endearing diminutive. But let them beware lest their judgment be too harsh. Frances was passionately loved by her parents, respected by all who knew her, and was herself warm and true, though not demonstrative in her attachments. She was reserved, not cold; full of controlled spirit, not wild, nor, in its lightsomest sense, gay; dutiful, though willful; obliging, but careless of praise.

At eighteen she was the proudest of all the proud beauties of her State. In thought, in feeling, she had been a woman years before, and now was mistaken for a woman of twentyfive. She was much courted, mainly by men of position, advanced in life; younger admirers hung upon her movements, never daring to advance. It was predicted that this woman would make a brilliant match, and none other, for never was there a woman seemingly more fitted for a marriage of convenience. Her queenly form, her high manner, her silvery but deliberate accents, claimed as their appropriate sphere the loftiest position in society.

If we would enjoy our work, we must accept it as a divine thing and put our whole heart in it. Work that is a mere contract with menwork that has exclusive reference to hours and tasks-is not work in that truer sense which conveys the meaning of labor as an institution ordained by God to renew the face of external nature, and to restore man's sovereignty over the inferior orders of creation. Industry and One who knew her well-he was her first skill-the strong muscle, the resolute will, the cousin and only intimate friend-doubted if she cultivated mind-may remove a portion of the would ever marry at all. He knew that to a curse that rests on the globe. Machinery may woman eminently refined and intellectual the lessen the "sweat of the brow," and science may choice of a husband was a problem almost too raise productive crops in the place of the thorn hard to be solved. Such a woman may not and thistle. The landscape may smile beneath confide in her instincts, for instinct in such wothe toils of a cheerful peasantry, while enter- men is subjected to the domination of reason; prise, commanding the services of philosophy and when a momentous question is transferred and art, may build cities and expand its mag- for decision from a woman's heart to a woman's nificent system of trade and commerce over mind, the issue is always protracted, and, of necontinents and oceans. These are vast results. cessity, most painful. It is a suit in English But work, as a divine ordinance, has far nobler Chancery, the decision of which can scarcely ends to accomplish. To subdue nature-to ever be satisfactory. Passion, be it of the warmbring the soil, the atmosphere, the waters under est, as most surely it is when its exhibition is its sway to convert the earth into a home fit suppressed-passion is frittered away under the for man: this is the humblest part of its office. slow and calm examination of conflicting claims. If our lost sovereignty over the material uni- And when, at last, the tardy decision is reached verse, so far as delegated to man, is thus to be-when the suitor is elected-he is elected not

do.

gladly, not with the sweetly-thrilling assent and | did, and thus women like to her are prone to unfearing, boundless confidence of the heart, but with the dispassionate coolness of the judgment, as a choice of evils. How repugnant it must be for a woman, in whom exists even a trace of natural delicacy, to place her person and destiny coldly in the keeping of a man, simply because he is a man, many, very many women know, alas! too well.

Frances Templeman was as far above the influence of sordid motives as she was above the reach of all merely worldly considerations and opinions petty, because purely egotistical. Naturally self-reliant, she had great need to be more 80, now that in her early womanhood she was left without a parent and without a guardian in whom she could in the least confide. Averse to conversation upon the subject of love, her views were nevertheless well known. They were speculative and unexact, more nice than comprehensive, subtle rather than true-as opinions of an unknown feeling must ever be. The highest tuition of her emotional nature—that nature, which, while it is the most docile pupil of passion, is at the same time the best teacher of the intellect-she had never experienced. She had never loved. It is much to say even of a dull girl, that she has reached the age of eighteen without having ever loved; it is almost impossible to believe when asserted of a girl exquisitely organized in body as in mind.

Yet

Her purpose fixed, she acted with yet more than her wonted prudence and deliberation. Five years passed away before she made her choice. Her reserve, and the common belief that she had decided never to marry, repelled many suitors; but her fresh and peerless beauty retained many more. There was no danger of her being compelled to choose the crooked stick. Suitors of seven years' standing were tied to her chariot wheels when she drove in triumph through the golden gates of matrimony. Was it indeed a triumph? So far as human power could judge it was.

Her decision was no secret to her cousin. It was his pleasure at all times, it was his duty now, to defer to a penetration infinitely superior to his own. He made no opposition. She knew men well. The values of wealth, of intellect, of birth, position, strength of character, and of amiability, she had estimated accurately. All these desiderata, in just and rare proportion, seemed combined in the person of her choice.

He was, of course, much older than herself. A widower with several children (most of whom, fortunately, were too nearly grown to require the arduous attentions or to imbibe the natural hatred of a step-mother). Judge Blondel imposed no harder task upon his bride than to do the honors of a house, which, if not the most imposing, was the most beautiful, for situation and architectural finish, of all the residences in a country noted for the loveliness of its scenery and the wealth and culture of its inhabitants. A more befitting mistress could not have been chosen. From the first moment she displayed, in that seat of social elegance, the natural ease and grace of a woman familiar with the command of a large and polished household.

it was literally true of Frances Templeman. Whoever chooses may believe that her pride, her will (or any other quality that made her the exalted woman she was), suppressed the first tender germs of the "sweet disorder;" but he, before whom her inmost soul lay unsheltered as lake before the sun, knows that she had never felt its lightest movement. The natural inference would be that she was insusceptible; and, satisfied with this inference, many will dismiss her, as something more or less than woman.peared to exist a cordiality of good feeling which But she was a woman, and precisely such a woman as a pure, moral atmosphere and an advanced civilization tend to produce. Her counterpart may be found, not in many cities, but in almost every village of this republic.

Further removed from the vice of sentimentality than the vast majority even of men, she nevertheless possessed the sentiment of love in its most subtle, which is its most concentrated, form. Could a proper object have been found, this sentiment might have known the arterial warmth of life; and he who had been blessed with her love, in true reciprocal appreciation, would have had but little to ask for in the life to come. But as the eye is dead to all forces save only the impalpable ether of light, so her susceptibility was of a fineness not to be moved by gross or ordinary influences, and lay dormant, but not dead, within her.

Between herself and her husband there ap

has ever been, and ever will be, mistaken for unanimity of sentiment and of will, and which, so long as the mistake remains undiscovered, answers all or nearly all the ends of a perfect congeniality. When a son was born to them, Frances Blondel thought the measure of her happiness was full, and in the abundance of her joy blessed God for that he had bestowed upon her the husband and man of her choice.

It is an error made by every young mother, especially if she be a cultivated woman married to a man of refinement and kind disposition-it is an error common to such mothers to confuse and blend the sources of loves which are distinct in origin, distinct in application, distinct in gratification. But in time the distinction becomes clear. No love can be purer or more intense than a mother's; indeed, in certain moods, it seems almost sacrilegious to compare It is questionable whether, taking personal any other love with that; but every woman happiness alone into view, such a woman ought knows that in her breast there is another fountever to marry; certainly it is unfortunate when, ain-strong, full, bright, warm-which seeks as a result of abstract reasoning, she concludes and finds repose for its ever-welling waters only that she should. This Frances Templeman in the ample ocean of a husband's love. If this

flowing tide find never its true reservoir, there | Her cousin for a time believed the ailment a happens in the woman's soul that calamity which any attempt at definition would serve only to obscure, but which many women, alas! how many, understand too well.

physical one, and Frances herself, although far too wise to be deceived as to its true nature or to be seduced into poisoning herself with drugs, was not unwilling that others should attribute to a feeble constitution a misfortune of the soul which could never be explained. She gladly accepted the alleviation of travel, and saw all that was worthy to be seen in America or in Europe.

How vain to such an invalid are all such tours! One ever-recurring question darkens the bright way, saddens the gay march. "What joy, what infinite rapture might not these scenes afford if my destiny were all it could-all it should be!" For the afflicted soul, ever too blind to the calamities of others, sees but its own woe, deems itself the special object of Divine injustice, and claims as its proper due a happiness accorded never to any of mortal birth. Defrauded of this happiness, it may meekly sub

Why it was that Frances Blondel could not love her husband it would be impossible to say. In all the relations of life he exhibited precisely those traits which go to make, humanly speaking, a perfect man. If he was not brilliant, he had that excellent balance of the intellectual faculties which is every where reckoned better than brilliance; if he was less wealthy than his office and his hereditary estates might have made him, it was because of a liberality to his children and a silent charity to the poor that did him honor: he lacked not one of the comforts or the elegances of life; and he was withal the best of neighbors, the most uxorious of husbands, and the kindest of masters. Nor was he very deficient in sentiment. Why such a man should not have commanded the heart-mit to the will of the Unchangeable One, and whole reverence of Frances Blondel, or of any woman, it is useless to ask. But wherein consists the mystery of that effect we name "love," and what constitutes the rational basis of that adoration which the first women of earth have entertained and cherished, against all scorn and contumely and poverty, for men hideous with faults? We know not. We read of, and easily comprehend, what has been styled a "cold perfection of character." But Judge Blondel was not chargeable with coldness; on the contrary, he was a man innately warm and true, and persistent in his affections; he had, besides, more than enough of the leaven of human infirmity to entitle him to human love. Why did not Frances love him? Go ask her. Her cousin never dared.

find its reward in a substituted peace. But it is and can be only a substitution; the original birth-right joy, consciously lost to the soul, must leave a vacuum, sad, vast, never to be filled.

Thirty years have been numbered since Mrs. Blondel returned from Europe, and sought, in the cares of her household and in the education of her children, that nepenthe she could never find amidst the most beautiful scenery and in the gayest capitals of the world. It may be believed that the faithful discharge of the high and holy duties of a mother brings sweet recompense, while it leaves small opportunity for the mind to dwell upon its private griefs. The flight of years, too, naturally lessens the rigor of all grief dependent upon ungratified sentiment, and places the deferred and different happiness in the permanency beyond the grave. But neither duty performed nor the deadening influences of Time, can assuage to the point of forgetfulness

was seized. In those lonely hours which come the oftener the more we seek to avoid them, the agony returns with force proportioned to its delay. No strength of will, and no intensity of prayer, avails to fortify the soul against that return.

This unexplained something, which, like the virtues of medicines, is ascertainable only upon trial-this something that makes or unmakes the happiness of marriages among the cultiva-a malady like that with which Frances Blondel ted, the gifted-this something (call it spiritual affinity if you will) it is which renders matrimony the lottery it has been proclaimed to be the world over, in all time. It rests with all of us, each to determine for himself whether he will adventure the chances of this lottery. The prizes are magnificent-but the risk is immense! When that cousin who continued after her marriage to be the intimate friend of Frances Blondel that he had been before-when that cousin ascertained that all was not well with her, it was, he now knows, long after she herself had perfectly understood the cause and the incurable nature of her trouble. So far as words go, that trouble has never been hinted, nor will it ever be. But there are revealing lights of the eye, which, when they are sought and met by kindred beams, leave nothing to be told, and say much that is beyond the power of speech. Frances knew that her secret was a secret no longer, but she also knew that it was safe even to the grave; and, assured of this, her unimparted confidence was a relief to her.

The sons and daughters of Frances Blondel grew up to man's and woman's estate, the pride, and justly the pride and joy, of her own and her husband's life. In intelligence, in excellence of manners and of morals, in obedient reverence for their parents, her children had no superiors, and scarcely any equals. Nor was the beauty of their persons at all unworthy their cultivated minds and admirable dispositions. He who could have beheld the Blondel family, assem bled, as it often was, in the soft twilights of summer, under the portico, festooned and perfumed with luxuriant vines; he who could have beheld that group, in the perfection of its harmony and the beauty of the contrasted ages of its members, would never have dreamed that the pale mother, who presided with such sweet

ness of its manifold relations. Her vigorous mind, in the vain attempt to escape the contemplation of what appears to it an ill-starred destiny, has sought and obtained knowledge of matters most foreign to an ordinary and contented woman's thoughts. It is painful to see with what feverish pleasure and unfeminine boldness she will discuss the most recondite questions of politics, of constitutional and of international law. A nice sense of duty to her daughters has advised her to intrust the greater portion of the

dignity over the group, had aught to account for her pallor, save that wearing-out of the physical system from which scarcely any American mother is exempt. But could he have become intimately acquainted with the family, he would have been struck by the fact, apparently unaccountable, that this mother, so happily married to the man of her choice, was strongly, almost bitterly opposed to marriage in the abstract, and particularly to the marriage of any of her own children. And so great was the force of her character, the influence of her train-household cares to them, and it is the leisure ing, and the reverential awe in which she was held by her sons and daughters, that the violence of her antipathy to matrimony scarcely equaled the fear of that institution which had mastered their young and plastic minds. Without well knowing why, they regarded marriage as perhaps the very worst of human ills, a calamity to be shunned at all hazards, to be accepted only upon the plea of necessity-a plea, it need scarcely be said, which can never be urged by those who, like themselves, were placed beyond the provocation of "bettering their condition."

If, when his wife first commenced to instill this antipathy into the minds of his children, a suspicion, as to its origin and nature, arose in the heart of Judge Blondel, that suspicion was never nursed into the hideous form and life of jealousy, but suffered, amidst the whirl of professional duties, to sink into the catalogue of "woman's whims," unworthy to be seriously combated or remembered. At length this "whim" assumed to his eye the graver aspect of a hobby, all the more ridiculous the graver it became. He was fond of joking his wife in company about it, and, so adroit was her tact, she encouraged him to joke the more. The Judge, now in his seventieth year, has as little conception of the true meaning of this "hobby" as he has of the atomic condition of the remotest stars. Well for him that it is so; for, advanced as he is, the heart within him is not so callous but it would burst on the instant with utter mortification and terror-terror because never, after the discovery, could he trust any of his senses again. He would seem mad to his own view, and to have lived mad and blind. Frances Blondel, younger than she looks, at the age of fifty-three, presents a spectacle and a lesson that must bring grief and almost despair to the heart of him who sees and interprets them aright. The wife-life, the wife-love, the wife-woman are dead (so far as the palsy of entire inaction hath power to kill them) within her, and have been dead years, long years ago. Every other joy of earth, save only the great joy of the wedded soul, she has known in boundless abundance. Yet they have not sufficed to give elasticity and strength to a frame, naturally strong with the strength of exceeding organic fineness, nor to remove the melancholy from a mind originally possessed of that highest cheerfulness which comes of a serene temperament and a clear perception of truth in the full wideVOL. XVII.-No. 101.-Uu

afforded by the removal of these cares which must be filled, perforce, by the driest, the most unprofitable studies.

This wasted old woman is a Christian in the best meaning of the term. She repines not; but the dead corpse of a life which should have been lived, of a system of intense emotions which found not their normal activity, can not be worn beside the throbbing heart without producing disastrous and unconcealable effects upon soul and body. Upon the one, doubt, terrible half-faith; upon the other, miserable nervous unsatisfaction. The cause of these effects may be, and happily in her case is, misunderstood; but the effects remain.

The evil of Frances Blondel's unhappy marriage to the man of her choice is confined to the cousin who owns her untold secret. He it is who returns from silent and piteous interviews with her, having in his inmost heart an acute and irrepressible sense of injustice, which wounds him because of its deadly impiety, yet will not away. Worse than this sense of injustice is the vain and painful questioning of his soul concerning the compensation possible for her in the coming life, whose dread approach marches fast upon himself and upon the wretched woman, who sinned not in choosing the man of her choice. The soul of Frances can not find a fitting sphere elsewhere than on high; but in heaven there is neither marrying nor giving in marriage; and in all the bright and endless cycles of eternity there must cleave inseparably to her the sad remembrance of a part, and perhaps the sweetest part, of human life, lost, lost, lost!

THE

VIRGINIANS.

BY W. M. THACKERAY.

PEOPLE

CHAPTER XLI.

RAKE'S PROGRESS.

were still very busy in Henry Warrington's time (not that our young gentleman took much heed of the controversy) in determining the relative literary merits of the ancients and the moderns; and the learned, and the world with them, indeed, pretty generally pronounced in favor of the former. The moderns of that day are the ancients of ours, and we speculate upon them in the present year of grace, as our grandchildren, a hundred years hence, will give their judgment about us. As