Let us not trust too much to the absence of feeling in these seemingly impassive organizations.
I wonder how often the executors of old college fellows, or of hard-faced bankers and bureaucrats, have been aggravated by finding in that most secret drawer, which ought to have held a codicil or a jewel, a tress, a glove, or a flower? The searcher looks at the object for a moment, and then throws it into the rubbish-basket, with a laugh if he is good-natured, with a curse if he is vicious and disappointed. Let it lie there--though the dead miser valued it above all his bank-stock, and kissed it oftener than he did his living and lawful wife and children--what is it worth now? Say, as the grim Dean of St. Patrick wrote on _his_ love-token, "Only a woman's hair."
Now these men, unknown to their best friend perhaps, had gone through the affliction which is so common that it is hard to speak of it without launching into truisms. This sorrow has made some men famous, by forcing them out into the world and shutting the door behind them. It has made the fortunes of some poets, who choose the world for their confidant, setting their bereavement to music, and bewailing Eurydice in charming volumes, that are cheap at "3_s._ 6_d._ in cloth, lettered." It has made some--I think the best and bravest--somewhat silent for the rest of their lives. I read some lines the other day wise enough to have sprung from an older brain than Owen Meredith's.
"They were pedants who could speak-- Grander souls have passed unheard; Such as felt all language weak; Choosing rather to record Secrets before Heaven, than break Faith with angels, by a word--"
Yes, many men have their Rachel; but--there being a prejudice against bigamy--few have even the Patriarch's luck, to marry her at last; for the wife _de convenance_ generally outlives her younger sister; and so, one afternoon, we turn again from a grave in Ephrata-Green Cemetery, somewhat drearily, into our tent pitched in the plains of Belgravia, where Leah--(there was ever jealousy between those two)--meets us with a sharp glance of triumph in her "tender eyes."