with the stern authority which many parents exercise over the
matrimonial affairs of their daughters, insisted upon her forming an
alliance to which the opposition of her own heart was the only
objection. So trifling an impediment was decisively put aside by him,
and Blanche, having delayed the marriage as long as possible, until the
time fixed for my return was past, and unable to plead any open
acknowledgment on my part which could justify her refusal, had no
alternative but to obey. 'I confess,' said she, in faltering tones,
'that, after my fate was fixed, and I was parted from you, as I
believed for life, I tried to believe that the love which had given so
slight witness in words to its truth and fervor must have faded
entirely away, and that I was forgotten, and perhaps supplanted. And
therefore, in the varied pursuits and pleasures of my new sphere, and
in the indulgence and kindness which ministered to the outer, but,
alas! never to the inner life, I sought happiness, and I, too, like
yourself, strove to forget. Ah! that art of forgetting, which the
Athenian coveted as the best of boons,--when was it ever found through
effort or desire? In all scenes of beauty or of excitement, in the
allurements of society, in solitude and in sorrow, my heart still
turned to you with ceaseless longing, as if you alone could touch its
master-chord, and waken the harmonies which were struggling for
expression. By slow degrees, as I learned to dissever you from the
material world, there came a conviction of the nearness of your spirit,
sometimes so positive that I would waken from a reverie, in which I
was lost to sights and sounds around me, with a sense of having been
in your actual presence. I was aware of an effect rather than of an
immediate consciousness,--as if the magnetism of your touch had swept
over me, cooling the fever of my brain, and charming to deep
tranquillity my troubled heart. And thus I learned, through similar
experience, the same belief as yours. I have felt the continuous