your hand, and looks up into your earnest face, will drive away from your annoyance all its weight.  As she lingers, leading off your thought with pleasant words, she knows well that she is redeeming you from care, and soothing you to that sweet calm which such home and such wife can alone bestow.  And in sickness,—­sickness that you almost covet for the sympathy it brings,—­that hand of hers resting on your fevered forehead, or those fingers playing with the scattered locks, are more full of kindness than the loudest vaunt of friends; and when your failing strength will permit no more, you grasp that cherished hand with a fulness of joy, of thankfulness, and of love, which your tears only can tell.

She is good; her hopes live where the angels live.  Her kindness and gentleness are sweetly tempered with that meekness and forbearance which are born of Faith.  Trust comes into her heart as rivers come to the sea.  And in the dark hours of doubt and foreboding you rest fondly upon her buoyant Faith, as the treasure of your common life; and in your holier musings you look to that frail hand, and that gentle spirit, to lead you away from the vanities of worldly ambition to the fulness of that joy which the good inherit.

——­Is Laura Dalton such an one?

VIII.

A Broken Hope.

Youthful passion is a giant.  It overleaps all the dreams, and all the resolves of our better and quieter nature; and drives madly toward some wild issue, that lives only in its frenzy.  How little account does passion take of goodness!  It is not within the cycle of its revolution:  it is below; it is tamer; it is older; it wears no wings.

And your proud heart flashing back to the memory of that sparkling eye which lighted your hope—­full-fed upon the vanities of cloister learning, drives your soberer visions to the wind.  As you recall those tones, so full of brilliancy and pride, the quiet virtues fade, like the soft haze upon a spring landscape driven westward by a swift, sea-born storm.  The pulse bounds; the eyes flash; the heart trembles with its sharp springs.  Hope dilates, like the eye, fed with swift blood leaping to the brain.

Again the image of Miss Dalton, so fine, so noble, so womanly, fills and bounds the Future.  The lingering tears of grief drop away from your eye, as the lingering loves of boyhood drop from your scalding passion, or drip into clouds of vapor.

You listen to the calm, thoughtful advice of the father, with a deep consciousness of something stronger than his counsels seething in your bosom.  The words of caution, of instruction, of guidance, fall upon your heated imagination like the night-dews upon the crater of an AEtna.  They are beneficent and healthful for the straggling herbage upon the surface of the mountain, but they do not reach or temper the inner fires that are rolling their billows of flame beneath!