loops, slender rails, wreathed with flowers and ivy, thrown carelessly abroad to enclose a certain moss-rose, or bear away the sweetness of a wild hawthorn-tree on the moors;-loops which have no kind of influence on the main line, taking out no strength to make, and leaving no ruin when done. And others-yes, there are other lines that are only loops too, and yet are never wholly cut off from the great artery,-never quite loosen the threads that bind them up with the beating heart: loops once run through the quiet cloisters of some old cathedral town, or out in the fresh fields and the dim woods, with only nature and love to bear them company together,-loops that were kept from joining in with that great artery, and making one line together, perhaps by poverty, perhaps by evil tongues, by difference of creed maybe, or by cold distrust of the power of love and work; but which are never wholly severed, and still run side by side, small, unseen, but not unfelt; buried in the hard road, and invisible to the world's eye, but palpitating breath for breath and step by step together,the unseen love and the outward life, the lost loop and the main line,-never to be thoroughly divorced, nay, not even in death! Nay, not even in death; for then they will join together, and the barriers of circumstance and the world be finally removed to the full fruition of an eternity of love and joy.

How often, too, is marriage itself but a loop in life; sometimes a loop including rich pastures and grandly-planned towns, sometimes nothing but a barren tract, with crag and swamp for all its accidents of scenery. If it has been a marriage of short duration, the loop runs back to the main line without disturbing a stone on its way. It is all as if it had never been, save the memory of the quiet fields and shady dingles out there in the tranquil country, where the birds sang so sweetly and the flowers bloomed so richly, and the whole air was redolent of love and the earth beautiful with joy. But all that has gone now! Back to the busy world, back to the swift and solitary career,-back to the strife and the turmoil, the heaving chest, and the straining hand,-that pleasant dream of love lies like the buried flowers hidden among the roots of the old trees, and the world claims back its worker, and life wrests its prize from death. Oh, those sad, sad loops!-those tear-written parentheses of young marriages, when the morning song of the birds was stilled ere it was noon, and the mournful beauty of the night came on before the day had even worn to its height! Dreams! dreams! why did they ever rise to disturb the placid waking of the days?

Loops, too, are marriages which do not fulfil their promise of union,which are only accidents, and not absorbents,-which keep themselves as circumstances apart from the main line, existing as excrescences not incorporate with the stream of life elsewhere flowing. They are mere parentheses in the body of the text, scarce helping to the better understanding of its meaning, and certainly not part of the written law. The line runs round them, and includes them; but though it knits them up with its own going, it does not receive from them health or help, or

give them back strength or vitality. They are districts lying apart, with a network of communication,-that is all. And when the districts are cold and stony, full of sand-heaps, where only couch-grass and groundsel and the baser weeds find their foothold,-when what there is of human life scattered up and down is given up to all manner of bitterness or folly, we cannot wonder if the main line runs back on itself at the earliest opportunity, and narrows the loop into the smallest space possible.

What right has Mrs. Fretful to feel aggrieved that her husband prefers his club to her society, and makes untimely use of his latch-key, when she never receives him without querulous complainings; when she checks every expansive impulse, and chills every warm belief; when she insists that the whole world is hastening to the condemnation that has no reprieve, and that he, Mr. Fretful, will be one of the earliest condemned? A man wants a little sunshine in his home; he does not want to be met with reproaches, or tears, or lamentations of all kinds. He is weary perhaps, having had the battle of life to fight pretty stiffly on his own platform; he may have come off badly in the business he undertook to-day, and may have had many a hard knock in the struggle, which has left him with an aching head and bruised muscles:-does he not need, then, peace and rest in his home? does he not need the tender heart that can feel, and the soft hand that can soothe? When his weary limbs droop for the hour of repose, is it well to give them a bed of thorns, which shall but change the manner of his pain? And yet this is what Mrs. Fretful does when she meets her husband with sourness and repining, then reproaches him with procuring, away from her, the pleasures she will neither grant nor share.

What does the main line find when it runs out of its course and falls among the stony places and the weedy sand-hills? A place of rest? A brave old town where it may build its shed, and arch-in its roof, and stay its further travel, content with so fine a terminus? Not it! it finds nothing but barrenness and desolation; so steams away from that ungrateful region at the speed of an express. Mrs. Fretful has only herself to thank that her marriage has not been a success,—an intermingling of their two lives, and not a mere isolated loop-a mere interpolated parenthesis. If by chance sorrow shall ever teach her wisdom, and her tears fall like living water on the barren sands of her nature, there may yet be time for the fair and fruitful town, where the journey may end, and the terminus be built. But, alas! alas! the Mrs. Fretfuls of life never did any thing half so wise yet as to overcome their weakness, and resolve on braver things. The couch-grass strangles the wheat, the groundsel pushes out the barley, and fretfulness and repining destroy all that there is of great or good or loving in the human heart.

And when that foolish little feather-head, Florinda, wilfully saddens her husband by her undisguised flirting,-flirting, I grant you, that has no harm in it, and means nothing but its own silly pleasure,—we cannot

wonder then, either, if the strong man's main line remains alone and distinct, and if his union with Florinda is nothing but a loop, after all,—an accident, a circumstance, and no interfusion of their two beings, as marriage should be. He stands apart and looks on, sorrowfully, perhaps sternly; humiliated in his pride, and disappointed in his love; but unless he tears asunder the banding that holds them both together,-unless he rives up the rails and breaks down the banks,-the best and only thing left him is just to stand apart and look on; to make his loop, too, as narrow as possible; to freight his carriages with the least amount of wealth from the mart of his life, and then to go off and onward, sadly and alone, to the town where the tide washes up the eternal waves, and the land is lost in the ocean. It might have been different. The strong man asked nothing better than a companion for his pleasures and a sympathiser in his pains; but Florinda was able to bring him only what she had for her dowry of heart and intelligence, and this was all too light and airy for real comradeship with one whose gravity was to her moroseness, and his very force an oppression. And yet what business had that main line, with all its wealth of human power and work for the generations, its burden of great thoughts and strong deeds,-what right had it to run off into garden-plots where nothing more important than lilies and tulips and damask-roses grew against the hedgerows? His fit country was the rich pasture-lands, with the farms nested among the trees, and the golden corn lying on the southern slopes; with herds of sleek cows grazing by the stream, and the village mill going merrily to the rush of the clear waters. He could have brought there iron-stone, and ore, big boulders for the churches, and coke for the furnaces, and cotton for the spinning-wheel; he could have brought there all the strength of labour and the power of man's busy brain, and he would have taken back to himself corn and milk and honey, and the happy voices of the little children and the soft hands of the village-girls. His man's strength would have mated itself with woman's richness, that, round about their knees, might have grown up the best perfection of their kind. As it was, he gathered only garden flowers, and they faded before the day's duties were well begun.

The man to work, and the woman to love; the man to earn, and the woman to distribute; the man to protect, and the woman to cling,—ah! that is the ideal life, which, unhappily, so few ever attain. Fewest of all those strong men of active work and manly labours who link to their fate those pretty puppets, those tinsel dolls of womanhood, whose life lies all among the gewgaws and the toys, and whose heart is nothing but a bunch of gilded charms, as hollow and as venal.

Loops and parentheses!-how thick they fall upon our way! how they stud the living page with their impressive signs! What poetry they contain sometimes! and, ah, what crushed and broken hearts they tell of too! That sole parenthesis of my childless life,-that little gentle girl who stepped down from heaven for her brief day, just long enough to

know the wording of a mother's love and the deliciousness of her babylife, when that precious word was written and then so quickly effaced, the book of days which its pleasant song had blazoned in gold grew dull and clouded, and never carried the echo of music to my heart again! That little bright-haired girl! she was but a slender silver cord knit up for a short span in the cold gray mantle of my life; she was but a brief word of poetry and love and heavenly music set in between two brackets on the page; but when the silver cord broke off, and the brief word was hushed, there was no more joy for me, no hope, and no return. My loveless line of life had made one little curve; it had gone in among the daisyfields, and to the woods where the blue-bells and anemones were growing; it had passed by the robin's nest, and heard the skylark singing;and all this was in the morning, when the dew lay on the grass: by the time the sun was above the hills, it had enclosed only a young child's grave. This was my loop-line, and this the acre which fate and death sowed for me.

Sad, too, was that mother's loop-line wherein lay her brave boy drenched with the salt waves and drowned in their pitiless wrath. She had looked long over the sea for him; she had prayed when the winds moaned loud, and the waves ran high; and most of all, she had prayed on the day when the breakers took a gallant ship and beat her like wild beasts against the rocks. But her prayers were lost in the loud moaning, and her tears fell unheeded among the salt spray; and the ship was flung upon the rocks, flung again and again, as a band of tigers might have flung a crippled deer among the fern; and there floated slowly out to the illimitable sea the dead body of her boy-the last word of all her hopes. And then what had been the main stanza in the poem of her love became now a mere parenthesis; a mere hope set in between brackets, but never destined to fulfilment.

Another such loop-line is sprinkled with blood, where the enemy's ball made a breach across the lines, and shattered their precious freight of youth and ambition to the dust. Of late years there have been many such the first cantos of heroic poems broken off before the tale was told; the opening strains of holy oratorios silenced before the master-theme was played. The loop-lines enclosing lives unfulfilled are very sad. The harvest blighted before it ripens, the fruit blasted in the bud, the life destroyed before its maturity-ah! these are solemn mysteries; mysteries which, if explained, would unlock the greatest secret of heaven and earth. That the grain should fall to the sickle when full in the ear and ready; that the fruit should be gathered when ripe; that old age should lie down to sleep, and life renew itself in that sole Castalia of the gods, the river of death,-seems easy to understand, and of necessary order; but the premature fall of things young and of natural uses-what theologian will explain that, and what philosopher reconcile?

But, apart from these graver kinds, there are sometimes unimportant

and unproductive runnings, as brief as a summer's day and as bright, where the way lies only among pleasant places, enclosing no regrets, and leaving behind no disappointments. Of such are summer trips abroad, or the autumn months spent down among our own dear lakes and lovely mountains; of such are those sparkling temporary friendships, where we see nothing but beauty and amiability, and do not linger long enough to probe down to what is unlovely and ungraceful. Rich as the latest vintage, sweet as the ripest grape, bright and spotless as virgin gold, are those temporary friendships, those wayside flowers of chance. We pluck them for a moment and place them in our bosoms, and admire their fragrance, and rejoice in their beauty; but we journey on from that wayside halting-place, and before we reach the inn where we are to pass the night, the flowers have dropped from our hands, and we remember them no Still they were gladdening while their freshness lasted-pleasant little runnings, leading nowhere and including nothing—merry interjections between parenthetical lines, which made us smile when we read them, but which have no kind of connexion with the text, no giving or getting from the main line.

more.

Partnerships are loops too; sometimes all askew, and with the traffic falling to one side, and utterly unable to be dragged up the steep incline, which either honesty or incapacity, either want of suspicion or want of insight, has raised up. And these loops, starting from prosperity, have often run into the main line again just below the level which the waters of the Bankruptcy Court have flooded. One ought to be very careful with whom one runs these parallel lines, these double loops, where there is facing for only one to the south, and where the cuttings are so perilously low, and the embankment so giddy and so toppling. Many a good man has been submerged, and never got his head above the waters again, all because he ran a partnership loop from the main line to the lower level, and did not study the gradients.

House-taking is a loop, a parenthesis of not unfrequent grating and ungenial sound; servants are parentheses, and rarely satisfactory ones; so are friends, whose coming and going stud the weekly ledger with innumerable brackets; dinner-parties are parentheses of nervous import to inexperienced mistresses short of efficient hands and with a cook of doubtful powers; a ball is a young girl's parenthesis, but a parenthesis that fills up a whole page and often overflows into the type beyond. I have known more than one young girl whose life-reading has been permanently affected by a ball-room paragraph, and whose ears never quite lost the echo of what she heard there. And I have known others who bound up their parentheses between the leaves of their church-services, and for every prayer to GOD sent up a sigh to the man above their heads, who then represented to them the Idea of the Divine. The clerical loop-line is rather a favourite one for young maidens to travel on, but hazardous too, only one being able to turn the switch and run into the main line, and many falling bruised and maimed in the struggle for the pointsman.