Presentiments

"With joy, my husband! My heart is full of joy. I am so happy, I
can only weep. Ah! tears alone speak for the true happiness."

"Ah! would it last, Julia--would it last!"

"Oh, doubt not that it will last. Why should it not t What have we
to fear?"

Mine was a serious nature. I answered sadly, if not gloomily:-"Because it is a joy of life that we feel, and it must share the
vicissitudes of life."

"True, true, but love is a joy of eternal life as well as of this."

There was a beautiful and consoling truth in this one little
sentence, which my self-absorption was too great, at the time, to
suffer me to see. Perhaps even she herself was not fully conscious
of the glorious and pregnant truth which lay at the bottom of what
she said. Love is, indeed, not merely a joy of eternal life: it is
THE joy of eternal life!--its particular joy--a dim shadow of which
we sometimes feel in this--pure, lasting, comparatively perfect,
the more it approaches, in its performances and its desires, the
divine essence, of which it is so poor a likeness. We should so
live, so love, as to make the one run into the other, even as a
small river runs down, through a customary channel, into the great
deeps of the sea. Death should be to the affections a mere channel
through which they pass into a natural, a necessary condition, where
their streams flow with more freedom, and over which, harmoniously
controlling, as powerful, the spirit of love broods ever with
"dovelike wings outspread." I answered, still gloomily, in the
customary world commonplaces:-"We must expect the storm. It will not be moonlight always. We must
look for the cloud. Age, sickness, death!--ah! do these not follow
on our footsteps, ever unerring, certain always, but so often rapid?
Soon, how soon, they haunt us in the happiest moments--they meet
us at every corner! They never altogether leave us."