"'On the fountains of our life a seal was set To keep their waters clear and bright Forever.'
"And thus, with scarce a word beside, I said the 'God be with you!' and went out into the world alone, yet henceforth not alone.
"Two years passed away. They had been years of success in my worldly affairs, and were blessed by memories and hopes which grew brighter with each day. I had not heard of Blanche, save indirectly through a friend in New Orleans, but I never doubted that the past was as sacred, the future as secure, in her eyes as in my own. I was now ready to return, and to repeat in words the vows which my heart had sworn long before. I fixed the time, and wrote to my friend to herald my coming. Before that letter reached him, there came tidings which, like a storm of desolation, swept me to the dust. Blanche was in France, and married,--how or when or to whom, I knew not, cared not. The relentless fact was sufficient. The very foundations of the earth seemed to tremble and slide from beneath me. The sounds of day tortured, the silence of night maddened me. I sought forgetfulness in travel, in wild adventure, in reckless dissipation. With that strange fatality which often leads us to seek happiness or repose where we have least chance of finding it, I, too, married. But I committed no perjury. I offered friendship, and it sufficed. Love I never professed to give, and the wife whom I merely esteemed had not the mental or the magnetic ascendancy which might have triumphed for a time over the image shrined in my inmost heart. I sought every avenue through which I might fly from that and from myself. I tried mental occupation, and explored literature and science, with feverish ardor and some reward. I think it is Coleridge who recommends to those who are suffering from extreme sorrow the study of a new language. But to a mind of deep feeling diversion is not relief. If we fly from memory, we are pursued and overtaken like fugitive slaves, and punished with redoubled tortures. The only sure remedy for grief is self-evolved. We must accept sorrow as a guest, not shun it as a foe, and, receiving it into close companionship, let the mournful face haunt our daily paths, even though it shut out all friends and dim the light of earth and heaven. And when we have learned the lesson which it came to teach, the fearful phantom brightens into beauty, and reveals an 'angel unawares,' who gently leads us to heights of purer atmosphere and more extended vision, and strengthens us for the battle which demands unfaltering heart and hope.