yesterday, no further gone, I went to visit a consumptive shoemaker; seated here I can single out his very house, nay, the very window of the room in which he is lying.  On that straw roof might the raven alight, and flap his sable wings.  There, at this moment, is the supreme tragedy being enacted.  A woman is weeping there, and little children are looking on with a sore bewilderment.  Before nightfall the poor peaked face of the bowed artisan will have gathered its ineffable peace, and the widow will be led away from the bedside by the tenderness of neighbours, and the cries of the orphan brood will be stilled.  And yet this present indubitable suffering and loss does not touch me like the sorrow of the woman of the ballad, the phantom probably of a minstrel’s brain.  The shoemaker will be forgotten—­I shall be forgotten; and long after, visitors will sit here and look out on the landscape and murmur the simple lines.  But why do death and dying obtrude themselves at the present moment?  On the turret opposite, about the distance of a gun-shot, is as pretty a sight as eye could wish to see.  Two young people, strangers apparently, have come to visit the ruin.  Neither the ballad queen, nor the shoemaker down yonder, whose respirations are getting shorter and shorter, touches them in the least.  They are merry and happy, and the gray-beard turret has not the heart to thrust a foolish moral upon them.  They would not thank him if he did, I dare say.  Perhaps they could not understand him.  Time enough!  Twenty years hence they will be able to sit down at his feet, and count griefs with him, and tell him tale for tale.  Human hearts get ruinous in so much less time than stone walls and towers.  See, the young man has thrown himself down at the girl’s feet on a little space of grass.  In her scarlet cloak she looks like a blossom springing out of a crevice on the ruined steps.  He gives her a flower, and she bows her face down over it almost to her knees.  What did the flower say?  Is it to hide a blush?  He looks delighted; and I almost fancy I see a proud colour on his brow.  As I gaze, these young people make for me a perfect idyl.  The generous, ungrudging sun, the melancholy ruin, decked, like mad Lear, with the flowers and ivies of forgetfulness and grief, and between them, sweet and evanescent, human truth and love!

Love!—­does it yet walk the world, or is it imprisoned in poems and romances?  Has not the circulating library become the sole home of the passion?  Is love not become the exclusive property of novelists and playwrights, to be used by them only for professional purposes?  Surely, if the men I see are lovers, or ever have been lovers, they would be nobler than they are.  The knowledge that he is beloved should—­must make a man tender, gentle, upright, pure.  While yet a youngster in a jacket, I can remember falling desperately in love with a young lady several years my senior,—­after the fashion of youngsters in jackets.  Could