"The star that lightens your bosom most,
And gives to your weary feet their speed,
Abides in a cottage beyond the mead."

It is useless to assert that the subject is worn threadbare. Threadbare
it may be to you, enervated and _blase_ man of pleasure, worn and
hardened man of the world; but it is not for you I write. The fountain
which leaps up fresh and living in every new life can never be exhausted
till the springs of all life are dry. Tell me, O lover, gazing into
those tender eyes uplifted to yours, twining the silken rings around
your bronzed finger, pressing reverently the warm lips consecrated to
you,--does it abate one jot or tittle of your happiness to know that
eyes just as tender, curls just as silken, lips just as red, have
stirred the hearts of men for a thousand years?

Love, then, is a _sine qua non_ in stories; and if love, why not
marriage? What pleasure can a humane and benevolent man find in
separating two individuals whose chief, perhaps whose sole happiness,
consists in being together? For certain inscrutable reasons, Divine
Benevolence permits evil to exist in the world. All who have a taste for
misery can find it there in exhaustless quantities. Johns are every day
falling in love with Katys, but marrying Isabels, and Isabels the same,
_mutatis mutandis_. We submit to it because there is no alternative; and
we believe that good shall finally be wrought and wrested from evil.
Don't, for heaven's sake, let us in mere wantonness introduce into
our novel-world the work of our own hand, an abridged edition, a
daguerreotype copy of the world without, of which we know so little and
so much. I always do and always shall read the last page of a novel
first; and if I perceive there any indications that matters are not