TRIALS OF THE HEART. BY MRS. BRAY. While passions glow, the heart, like heated steel, YOUNG. A NEW EDITION, REVISED AND CORRECTED, WITH NOTES BY THE AUTHOR. LONDON: LONGMAN, BROWN, GREEN, AND LONGMANS, PATERNOSTER-ROW. 1845. 249.3.148. TO MRS. OPIE. MY DEAR MADAM, So many years have elapsed since I had the pleasure of being most hospitably received by yourself and your lamented father at Norwich, that I should hardly venture to remind you thus publicly of myself, did I not wish to offer you my unfeigned thanks for the delight I have received from so many of your writings. Feeling that in treating of the heart, I could never dedicate a work of such a description to one who has more deeply searched its most hidden recesses, nor more powerfully depicted its feelings, than yourself, I venture to inscribe to you the following pages. Should you trace in them anything akin in spirit, however much inferior to your own admirable story of "The Confessions of an Odd-Tempered Man," or "The Simple Tales," I shall consider it the highest praise that could be bestowed on "Trials of the Heart." Believe me, my dear Madam, with the most respectful esteem, very sincerely yours, ANNA ELIZA BRAY. The Vicarage, Tavistock, Nov. 25th, 1845. PREFACE. In a work which endeavours to trace and to develope the feelings of the human heart, under some of the most painful trials and circumstances to which it can be exposed in the chances of this world, it may be expected something more than that the writer has attempted to paint from nature should be said, as to the sources in real life whence she has drawn her observations and her experience, to enable her to perform her task. Some few of her personal friends, whose tried affection has stood the test of years of weal and woe, who have known her intimately from early youth, and who are well acquainted with many of the severe trials and calamities with which it pleased Almighty God to visit her, at various periods of her life, will be at no loss to guess whence she has derived her experience of the sufferings of the heart-of a heart that feels acutely all those ills "the flesh is heir to"-connected in divers ways with the deepest affections, and the dearest and most sacred ties, of our nature. And it has also so chanced, in her progress through life, that an intimate and affectionate intercourse with some of those very friends has been the means of affording her opportunities of experience, respecting the trials of the heart in others, which, though widely differing in circumstances, have, in some instances, been no less severe than her own. Friends, to whom these things are known, will feel that the writer has had for many years that book of nature spread before her, which is never studied without profit when the overruling providence of God is ever borne in mind as the comment and the key. These general observations will be sufficient to shew in what school she has studied "the deep things of the heart;" for the rest it may be asked (indeed it has been asked) who are the principal personages introduced in the following pages? Were they real, in part real, or altogether fictitious characters? Who, for instance, was Mary Armerage? who Charles Edwards? who Madame de Clairval? or who Philippe? To questions so minute as these, the writer does not think that an author is or ought to be expected to make |