When a woman of sensibility says she loves a man, she has told, through a medium that works out the conditions of the responding powers of our common nature, the heart, more than all the eulogistic eloquence of the tongue could achieve, to show the estimate she forms of the qualities of the object of her affections; but when she adds that that love originated in the friendship of children, grew with the increase of the powers of mind and body, and entered as a part into every feeling that actuated the young hearts, she has expressed the terms of an endearment so pure, tender, exclusive, and lasting, that it transcends all the ordinary forms of the communion of spirits on earth. The attachment is different from all others--it stands by itself; and to endeavour to conceive its purity and force by any factitious mixture of friendship, and the ordinary endearments of limited time and favourable circumstances of meeting, would be as vain as all hypothetical investigation into the nature of feeling must ever be. I cannot tell when I first knew the young man whose name I have mentioned under an emotion that shakes my frame; the syllables were a part of my early lispings, and I cannot yet think that they are unconnected with a being that has now no local habitation upon earth. Our parents were intimate neighbours; and the woods and waters of ----, if their voices--sweeter than articulated intelligence--could imitate the accents of man, would tell best when they wooed us into that communion, which they cherished, and witnessed, with an apparent participation of our joy, to open into an early affection. The power of mutual objects of pleasure and interest, especially if they are a part of the lovely province of nature--the rural landscape, secluded and secreted from the eyes of all the world besides, with its dells and fountains, birds and flowers--in increasing the attachment of young hearts, has been often observed and described; but we felt it. These inanimate objects are generally, and were to us, not only a tie, but they shared a part of our love, as if in some mysterious way they had become connected with, and a part of us. The often imputed association of ideas is a poor and inadequate solution of this work of nature: it is the effect put for the cause; the common, boasted philosophy of man, who invents terms of familiar sound to explain secrets eternally hidden from him. If we who felt, as few have ever felt, the influence of these green, umbrageous shades--with their nut-trees, bushes, flowers, and gowany leas; their singing birds, and nests with speckled eggs; their half-concealed fountains of limpid water, and running streams, and beds of white pebbles--in nourishing and increasing our young loves, could not tell how or why they were invested with such power; the philosopher, I deem, may resign the task, and say, with a sigh, that it was nature, and nature alone, who did all this; and the secret will remain unexplained.