Without apprehending the extent of my own weakness, the forms that
it would take, or the tyrannies that it would inflict, I was still
not totally uninformed on the subject of my peculiar character;
and, fearing then rather that I might pain my wife by some of its
wanton demonstrations, than that she would ever furnish me with,
an occasion for them, I took an opportunity, a few evenings after
our marriage, to suggest to her the necessity of regarding my
outbreaks with an indulgent eye.
My heart had been singularly softened by the most touching
associations. We sat together in our piazza, beneath a flood of
the richest and balmiest moonlight, screened only from its silvery
blaze by interposing masses of the woodbine, mingled with shoots
of oleander, arbor-vitae, and other shrub-trees. The mild breath
of evening sufficed only to lift quiveringly their green leaves
and glowing blossoms, to stir the hair upon our cheeks, and give
to the atmosphere that wooing freshness which seems so necessary
a concomitant of the moonlight. The hand of Julia was in mine.
There were few words spoken between us; love has its own sufficing
language, and is content with that consciousness that all is right
which implores no other assurances. Julia had just risen from the
piano: we had both been touched with a deeper sense of the thousand
harmonies in nature, by listening to those of Rossini; and now,
gazing upon some transparent, fleecy, white clouds that were slowly
pressing forward in the path of the moonlight, as if in duteous
attendance upon some maiden queen, our mutual minds were busied
in framing pictures from the fine yet fantastic forms that glowed,
gathering on our gaze. I felt the hand of Julia trembling in my
own. Her head sank upon my shoulder; I felt a warm drop fall from
her eyes upon my hand, and exclaimed-"Julia, you weep! wherefore do you weep, dear wife?"
"With joy, my husband! My heart is full of joy. I am so happy, I
can only weep. Ah! tears alone speak for the true happiness."
"Ah! would it last, Julia--would it last!"
"Oh, doubt not that it will last. Why should it not t What have we
to fear?"
Mine was a serious nature. I answered sadly, if not gloomily:-"Because it is a joy of life that we feel, and it must share the
vicissitudes of life."
"True, true, but love is a joy of eternal life as well as of this."
There was a beautiful and consoling truth in this one little
sentence, which my self-absorption was too great, at the time, to
suffer me to see. Perhaps even she herself was not fully conscious
of the glorious and pregnant truth which lay at the bottom of what
she said. Love is, indeed, not merely a joy of eternal life: it is
THE joy of eternal life!--its particular joy--a dim shadow of which
we sometimes feel in this--pure, lasting, comparatively perfect,
the more it approaches, in its performances and its desires, the
divine essence, of which it is so poor a likeness. We should so
live, so love, as to make the one run into the other, even as a
small river runs down, through a customary channel, into the great
deeps of the sea. Death should be to the affections a mere channel
through which they pass into a natural, a necessary condition, where
their streams flow with more freedom, and over which, harmoniously
controlling, as powerful, the spirit of love broods ever with
"dovelike wings outspread." I answered, still gloomily, in the
customary world commonplaces:-"We must expect the storm. It will not be moonlight always. We must
look for the cloud. Age, sickness, death!--ah! do these not follow
on our footsteps, ever unerring, certain always, but so often rapid?
Soon, how soon, they haunt us in the happiest moments--they meet
us at every corner! They never altogether leave us."