For still you must think, as you eat, as you drink,
    As you hunt with your dogs and your guns,
  How your pleasures are bought with the wealth that she brought,
    And you were once hunted by duns. 
  Oh, I envy you not your more fortunate lot: 
  I’ve a wife all my own in my own little cot,
  And with happiness, which is the only true riches,
    The cup of our love overruns.

  We have bright, rosy girls, fair as ever an earl’s,
    And the wealth of their curls is our gold;
  Oh, their lisp and their laugh, they are sweeter by half
    Than the wine that you quaff red and old! 
  We have love-lighted looks, we have work, we have books,
    Our boys have grown manly and bold,
  And they never shall blush, when their proud cousins brush
  From the walls of their college such cobwebs of knowledge
    As careless young fingers may hold.

  Keep your pride and your cheer, for we need them not here,
    And for me far too dear they would prove,
  For gold is but gloss, and possessions are dross,
    And gain is all loss, without love. 
  Yon severing tide is not fordless or wide,—­
  The soul’s blue abysses our homesteads divide: 
  Down through the still river they deepen forever,
    Like the skies it reflects from above.

  Still my brother thou art, though our lives lie apart,
    Path from path, heart from heart, more and more. 
  Oh, I have not forgot,—­oh, remember you not
    Our room in the cot by the shore? 
  And a night soon will come, when the murmur and hum
    Of our days shall be dumb evermore,
  And again we shall lie side by side, you and I,
  Beneath the green cover you helped to lay over
    Our honest old father of yore.

* * * * *

A half-life and half A life.

  “On garde longtemps son premier amant, quand on n’en prend point de
   second.”

  Maximes Morales du Duc de la Rochefoucauld..

It is not suffering alone that wears out our lives.  We sometimes are in a state when a sharp pang would be hailed almost as a blessing,—­when, rather than bear any longer this living death of calm stagnation, we would gladly rush into action, into suffering, to feel again the warmth of life restored to our blood, to feel it at least coursing through our veins with something like a living swiftness.

This death-in-life comes sometimes to the most earnest men, to those whose life is fullest of energy and excitement It is the reaction, the weariness which they name Ennui,—­foul fiend that eats fastest into the heart’s core, that shakes with surest hand the sands of life, that makes the deepest wrinkles on the cheeks and deadens most surely the lustre of the eyes.