and they alone are what render it supportable.  The mystic scrolls over which I had once pored with such intenseness, were now flung aside; what could they teach me?  Time was to me but one great vacancy; how could I fill it up, who had neither labour nor excitement?  I set me down mournfully, and thought of the past.  Why, when love is perished, should its memory remain?  I had said to myself, so long as I have life, one deep feeling must absorb my existence.  A change—­and that too of my own earnest seeking—­had passed over my being; and the past, which had been so precious, was now as a frightful phantasm.  The love which alters, in its inconstancy may set up a new idol, and worship again with a pleasant blindness; but the love which leaves the heart with a full knowledge of its own vanity and nothingness,—­which saith, The object of my passion still remains, but it is worthless in my sight—­never more can I renew my early feeling—­I marvel how I ever could have loved—­I loathe, I disdain the weakness of my former self;—­ah, the end of such love is indeed despair!

“Do you mark yonder black marble slab, which is spread as over a tomb?  It covers the most silvery fountain that ever mirrored the golden light of noon, or caught the fall of the evening dew, in an element bright as themselves.  The radiant likeness of a spirit rests on those waters.  I bade him give duration to the shadow he flung upon the wave, that I might gaze on it during his absence.  The first act of my immortality was to shut it from my sight.  There must that black marble rest for ever.”

[By the way, the ancients are excellent judges of beauty.  Socrates calls beauty (we dare not use the contemptible it,) a short-lived tyranny:  Xenophon says “Fire burns only when we are near it; but a beautiful face burns and inflames, though at a distance:  Plato calls beauty a privilege of nature:  Theophrastus (arch fellow,) a silent cheat:  Theocritus, (cunning elf,) a delightful prejudice; Carneades, a solitary kingdom, (which he doubtless would keep to himself):  Domitian says that nothing is more grateful, (not even killing flies); Aristotle affirms that beauty is better than all the letters of recommendation in the world:  Homer, that it is a glorious gift of nature; and Ovid calls beauty a favour bestowed by the gods, which this same Ovid shows the gods to have been jealous of among mortals.”  Certainly the moderns do not wage war for a beautiful woman, as did the ancients:  we fear they would rather fight for an old castle.

To conclude, if, as Steele tells us, “to make happy is the true empire of beauty;” why, buy the Book of Beauty, to be sure.]

* * * * *

THE COMIC OFFERING

[Miss Sheridan presents us with her third volume of ladye mirth, as heretofore, over-flowing with fun and patter, and sprinkled with some sixty or seventy Cuts—­many of them, to use a critical term, of “spirited design.”  Probably, the most humorous tale among the fifty is—­]