It is noted of the wives of fishermen on the islands that fringe the west coasts of Holstein and Sleswig-" a hardy, simple-minded people, of Frisian extraction," and whose position and occupation have given a "somewhat serious cast to their character and habits "—that they generally attire themselves in black during the absence of their husbands, as though recognising the practical identity of absence and death. The lover in Mr. Coventry Patmore's poem indirectly argues to the same effect:

:

But the majority of reflective minds, endued with ordinary sensibility, will acquiesce in the justness of Wordsworth's sharpdrawn line of demarcation, "Absence and death, how differ they!" As persons, to use a simile of Mrs. Inchbald's, enjoy the consciousness of having in their possession some valuable gem, though circumstances prevent, and ever will prevent, their wearing or airing it; so the assurance that a beloved friend is living, however far away,* and however unlikely to be ever seen again, is utterly distinct in its consoling tendency from the desolating conviction of his being dead and gone.

Still more does the distinction hold when there remains an indefinite hope of reunion between living absentees. A popular essayist accounts it sad enough when those who sat in infancy by the same fireside, and prayed at the same parent's knee, must fight the battle of life far apart, each bearing cares and knowing men that the other will never see nor know. And yet, he goes on to say, "though half the world be the space that parts them, and years have passed on since last they met, while they remain in this life the means of communication are

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*Jane Eyre exclaims, on hearing Mr. Rochester spoken of as yet alive,— Gladdening words! It seemed I could bear all that was to come-whatever the disclosures might be-with perfect tranquillity. Since he was not in the grave, I could bear, I thought, to learn that he was at the antipodes." -Jane Eyre, ch. xxxvi.

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not cut off; and it is at least possible that they may meet again. But the parting which death makes is absolute and complete." Rousseau calls the idea of death, in this aspect, so terrible (si affreuse), that any and every other idea is mild in comparison; and such an idea is that of absence, however distant in space, and however prolonged in time.

One of the most eminent of American divines makes it clear how differed absence from death in his regard, when he writes to a friend, who, far away, is to him very present: “Do you not know what it is to have a kind of latent remembrance of friends, even when they are not directly present to the mind? We have a secret consciousness of their existence, which makes the world a brighter spot to us. A light comes from them, as from the sun, when other things are thought of.” The reflection indeed is applicable, in a degree, to the absent dead themselves. Just as the absent may be considered as dead, by the sad and sombre-minded, so by the buoyant in hope and faith may the dead be considered as only absent. "Let us cease to be disquieted for their absence who have but retired into another chamber,” says one of the mortal immortals in Landor's Pentameron. As Gabriel, hopelessly absent and undiscoverable, to Evangeline, now declining in the vale of years,―

"He had become to her heart as one who is dead, and not absent,” so to believing affection the dead and gone become as it were but living absentees. But this is only in some cases, not common ones; and perhaps possibly only in some minds, not common ones either.

Swift expresses the very sentiment of Wordsworth's distinction, so deep-drawn, between absence and death, when he writes from Ireland to Pope, touching the deaths of Gay and the Doctor, which, he says, “have been terrible wounds near my heart.” "Their living would have been a great comfort to me, although I should never have seen them; like a sum of money in a bank, from which I should receive at least annual interest "—in the shape of a letter at any rate once a year.

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Pope, again, opens a paragraph in one of his letters with the words, "Absence is a short kind of death." But between the longest absence and death he would have been prompt to recognise how great the difference. So was another prince of letter-writers among our standard poets-William Cowper. In an epistle in prose to that Joseph Hill, Esq., to whom he addressed an ever-memorable epistle in verse, the bard of Olney thús expresses himself on the broad as deep distinction between absence and death: "While our friends yet live inhabitants of the same world with ourselves, they seem still to live to us; we are sure that they sometimes think of us; and however improbable it may seem, it is never impossible that we may see each other once again. But the grave, like a great gulf, swallows all such expectations; and in the moment when a beloved friend sinks into it, a thousand tender recollections awaken a regret, that will be felt in spite of all reasonings, and let our warnings have been what they may." Absence implies life, and while there's life there's hope. Absence may be, and is, a type of death-a foreshadowing of death. But to identify them is passable only by poetical licence.

Where a life is bound up in a life, broken confidence may be more veritably fatal than death itself. When love is razed out of life, the "ruins of all else loom dismal in the darkness;" all hope seems stricken from the future, as a man "strikes from the calculations of his income the returns from a property irrecoverably lost." When amidst the confidence of the heart, as a student of its passions has said, there starts up the form of perfidy, and he learns that, day after day, the life entwined with his own has been a lie and a stage-mime,-what he feels is less the softness of grief, or the absorption of rage, than a horror that appals. "The heart does not bleed, the tears do not flow, as in woes to which humanity is commonly subjected; it is as if something that violates the course of nature had taken place." And in his home, the ablest man, we are sadly reminded, the most subtle and observant, can be as much a dupe as the simplest. Hawthorne says that the young and

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pure are not apt to find out the miserable truth of the actual existence of sin in the world, until it is brought home to them by the guiltiness of some trusted friend. Some mortal, whom they reverence too highly, is commissioned by Providence to teach them this direful lesson; and Adam falls anew, and Paradise, heretofore in unfaded bloom, is lost again, and closed for ever, with the fiery swords gleaming at its gates.* Of all the agonies in life, that which another master of prose fiction declares to be most poignant and harrowing-that which for the time most annihilates reason, and leaves our whole organisation one lacerated, mangled heart—is the conviction that we have been deceived where we placed all the trust of love. "The moment the anchor snaps, the storm comes on-the stars vanish behind the cloud." We have cited lines (p. 45) in which Othello bewails the assumed treachery. Shakspeare's Leonato resembles him in his bitterness of grief, as well as in the delusion that has occasioned it :

"But mine, and mine I loved, and mine I praised,
And mine that I was proud on; mine so much
That I myself was to myself not mine,

Valuing of her; why she- -oh, she is fallen
Into a pit of ink!”

If equally clamorous, less sincere is the complainer in Mr. Tennyson's Idylls, who claims to have been stabbed through the heart's affections to the heart, seethed like the kid in its own mother's milk; and henceforth the course of life, that seemed so flowery to her with one for guide and master, only one, becomes the sea-cliff pathway broken short, and ending in a ruin-nothing left, but into some low cave to crawl, and there weep life away. Simpler and heartier is the utterance of another idyll :

"Not to be with you, not to see your face—

Alas for me then, my good days are done."

"Her dearest friend, whose heart seemed the most solid and richest of Hilda's possessions, had no existence for her any more; and in that dreary void, out of which Miriam had disappeared, the substance, the truth, the integrity of life, the motives of effort, the joy of success, had departed along with her."-Transformation, ch. xxiii.

So with Talfourd's Halbert: must he give up all, and yet live on ? No human hope remains for him, if this be blasted. Constancy he had sought among the rocks, and thought he had found it :

"One exquisite affection took its root,

And strengthened in its marble ;—if you tear
That living plant, with thousand fibres, thence,
You break up all; my struggles are in vain,
And I am ruin !"

Robert South takes this to be the sure, infallible test of love, that the measure of its strength is to be taken by the fastness of its hold. "Benjamin was apparently dearest to his father, because he was still kept with him, while the rest of his brethren were sent from him. He was to him as the apple of his eye, and therefore no wonder if he could not endure to have him out of it." Ni que je vive enfin si je ne vis pour toi, and one might add, si je vis sans toi. Or, as Racine's Titus has it, "Je sens bien que sans vous je ne saurais plus vivre." Little avails it to moralize with an old English moralist on the fact, that certainly they can never live in quiet, who so entirely give themselves up to particular objects. When in one object we place all our hopes and cares, what do we, he asks, but, like foolish merchants, venture all our estate in one bottom? “It is not good to bring ourselves to that extreme necessity, that the failure of one aim should leave us destitute." Des Comines, in Scott's novel, essays in vain to reconcile the French king to an abandonment of the scheme on which his heart is set, reminding him, to no purpose, that every wise man, when he sees a rock giving way, withdraws from the bootless attempt of preventing the fall. Lewis protests that this now imperilled scheme has been the favourite scheme of his whole life-that he has fought for it, watched for it, prayed for it, and sinned for it. He cannot, will not, forego it. "Philip des Comines,—think, man, think!—pity me in this extremity-thy quick brain can speedily find some substitute for this sacrifice-some ram to be offered up instead of that project which is dear to me as the patriarch's only son was to