A PASSAGE IN HUMAN LIFE.

BY WILLIAM HOWITT.

In my daily walks into the country, I was accustomed to pass a certain cottage. It was no cottage orne;-it was no cottage of romance. It had nothing particularly picturesque about it. It had its little garden, and its vine spreading over its front; but beyond these, it possessed no feature likely to fix it in the mind of a poet, or a novel-writer, and which might induce him to people it with beings of his own fancy. In fact, it appeared to be inhabited by persons as little extraordinary as itself. A good-man of the house it might possess,-but he was never visible. The only inmates I ever saw, were a young woman, and another female in the wane of life, no doubt the mother.

The damsel was a comely, fresh, mild-looking, cottage girl enough; always seated in one spot, near the window, intent on her needle. The old dame was as regularly busied, to and fro, in household affairs. She appeared one of those good housewives, who never dream of rest, except in sleep. The cottage stood so near the road, that the fire at the farther end of the room, showed you, without being rudely inquisitive, the whole interior, in the single moment of passing. A clean hearth, and a cheerful fire, shining upon homely, but neat, and orderly furniture, spoke of comfort; but whether the dame enjoyed, or merely diffused, that comfort, was a problem.

I passed the house many successive days. It was always alike, -the fire shining brightly and peacefully :-the girl seated at her post, by the window;-the housewife going to and fro, catering and contriving, dusting and managing. One morning as I went by there was a change, the dame was seated near her daughter, her arms laid upon the table, and her head reclined upon her arms. I was sure that it was sickness, which had compelled her to that attitude of repose; nothing less could have done it. I felt that I knew exactly the poor woman's feelings. She had felt a weariness stealing upon her;-she had wondered at it, and struggled against it, and borne up, hoping it would pass by; till, loth as she was to yield, it had forced submission.

The next day, when I passed, the room appeared as usual: the fire burning pleasantly,-the girl at her needle, but her mother was not be seen; and glancing my eye upwards, I perceived the blind close-drawn in the window above. It is so, I said to myself, disease is in its progress. Perhaps it occasions no gloomy fear of conse

quences, no extreme concern; and yet who knows how it may end? It is thus that begin those changes, that draw out the central bolt which holds together families; which steal away our fire-side faces, and lay waste our affections.

I passed by, day after day. The scene was the same. The fire burning the hearth beaming clean and cheerful: but the mother was not to be seen ;-the blind was still drawn above. At length I missed the girl; and, in her place, appeared another woman, bearing considerable resemblance to the mother, but of a quieter habit. It was easy to interpret this change. Disease had assumed an alarming aspect ;--the daughter was occupied in intense watching, and caring for the suffering mother; and the good-woman's sister had been summoned to her bedside, perhaps from a distant spot, and perhaps from her family cares, which no less important an event could have induced her to elude.

Thus appearances continued some days. There was a silence around the house, and an air of neglect within it;-till, one morning, I beheld the blind drawn in the room below, and the window thrown open above. The scene was over;-the mother was removed from her family, and one of those great changes effected in human life, which commence with so little observation, but leave behind them such lasting effects.

GOD AND HEAVEN.

I.

THE silver chord in twain is snapped,
The golden bowl is broken,

The mortal mould in darkness wrapped,
The words funereal spoken;

The tomb is built, or the rock is cleft,
Or delved is the grassy clod.

And what for mourning man is left?
O what is left-but God!

IL

The tears are shed that mourned the dead,
The flowers they wore are faded;

The twilight dun hath veiled the sun,

And hope's sweet dreamings shaded :

And the thoughts of joy that were planted deep,

From our heart of hearts are riven;
And what is left us when we weep?
O what is left-but Heaven!

BOWRING.

BESSY BELL AND MARY GRAY.

A SCOTTISH LEGEND OF 1666.

BY DELTA.*

It was in the yet Doric days of Scotland (comparing the present with the past) that Kenneth Bell, one of the lairds of the green holms of Kinvaid, having lost his lady by a sudden dispensation of Providence, remained for a long time wrapt up in the reveries of grief, and utterly inconsolable. The tide of affliction was at length fortuitously stemmed by the nourice bringing before him his helpless infant daughter-the very miniature of her de parted mother, after whom she had been named.

The looks of the innocent babe recalled the father's heart to a sense of the duties which life yet required of him; and little Bessy grew up in health and beauty, the apple of her father's eye. Nor was his fondness for her diminished, as year after year more fully developed those lineaments which at length ripened into a more matured likeness of her who was gone. She became, as it were, a part of the old man's being; she attended him in his garden walks; rode out with him on her palfrey on sunny mornings; and was as his shadow by the evening hearth. She doted on him with more than a daughter's fondness; and he, at length, seemed bound to earth by no tie save her existence.

It was thus that Bessy Bell grew up to woman's stature; and, in the quiet of her father's hall, she was now in her eighteenth year, a picture of feminine loveliness. All around had heard of

the beauty of the heiress of Kinvaid. The cottager who experienced her bounty drank to her health in his homely jug of nutbrown ale; and the squire, at wassail, toasted her in the golden wine-cup.

The dreadful plague of 1666 now fell out, and rapidly spread its devastations over Scotland. Man stood aghast; the fountains of society were broken up; and day after day brought into rural seclusion some additional proofs of its fearful ravages. Nought was heard around but the wailings of deprivation; and omens in the heavens and on the earth heralded miseries yet to come.

Having been carried from Edinburgh (in whose ill-ventilated closes and wyndes it had made terrible havoc) across the Frith of Forth, the northern counties were now thrown into alarm, and families broke up, forsaking the towns and villages to disperse

*From the "Forget Me Not," 1831.

themselves under the freer atmosphere of the country. Among others, the laird of Kinvaid trembled for the safety of his beloved child, and the arrival of young Bruce, of Powfoulis Priory, afforded him an excellent opportunity of having his daughter escorted to Lynedoch, the residence of a warmly attached friend and relative.

Under the protection of this gallant young squire, Bessy rode off on the following morning, and, the day being delightful, the young pair, happy in themselves, forgot, in the beauty of nature, the miseries that encompassed them.

Besides being a youth of handsome appearance and engaging manners, young Bruce had seen a good deal of the world, having for several years served as a member of the body guard of the French king. He had returned from Paris only a few months before, and yet wore the cap and plume peculiar to the distinguished corps to which he still belonged. The heart of poor Bessy Bell was as sensitive as it was innocent and unsophisticated; and, as her protector made his proud steed fret and curvet by her side, she thought to herself, as they rode along, that he was like one of the knights concerning whom she had read in romance, and, unknown to herself, there awoke in her bosom a feeling to which it had hitherto been a stranger.

Her reception at Lynedoch was most cordial; nor the less so, perhaps, on the part of the young lady of that mansion, because her attendant was Bruce, the secret but accepted suitor for the hand of Mary Gray. Ah! had this mystery been once revealed to Bessy Bell, what a world of misery it would have saved her!

From the plague had our travellers been flying; but the demon of desolation was here before them, and the smoke was ceasing to ascend from many a cottage-hearth. It became necessary that the household of Lynedoch should be immediately dispersed. Bruce and Lynedoch remained in the vicinity of the dwelling-house, and a bower of turf and moss was reared for the young ladies on the pastoral banks of the Brauchie-burn, a tributary of the Almond.

It was there that Bessy Bell and Mary Gray lived for a while in rural seclusion, far from the bustle and parade of gay life, verifying in some measure what ancient poetry hath feigned of the golden age. Bruce was a daily visitant at the bower by the Brauchieburn: he wandered with them through the green solitudes; and, under the summer sun and a blue sky, they threaded ofttimes together the mazes of "many a bosky bourne and bushy dell." They chased the fantastic squirrel from bough to bough, and scared the thieving little weasel from the linnet's nest. Under a great tree they would seat themselves, as Bruce read aloud some story of

chivalry, romance, or superstition, or soothed the listless hours of the afternoon with the delightful tones of the shepherd's pipe. More happy were they than the story-telling group, each in turn a queen, who, in like manner, flying from the pestilence which afflicted Florence, shut themselves up in its delightful gardens, relating those hundred tales of love which have continued to delight posterity in the glowing pages of Boccaccio.

Under whatever circumstances it is placed, human nature will be human nature still. When the young and the beautiful meet together freely and unreservedly, the cold restraints of custom and formality must be thrown aside; friendship kindles into a warmer feeling, and love is generated. Could it be otherwise with our ramblers in their green solitude?

Between Mary Gray and young Bruce a mutual and understood attachment had long subsisted; indeed they only waited his coming of age to be united in the bonds of wedlock; but the circumstance, for particular reasons, was cautiously concealed within their own bosoms. Even to Bessy Bell, her dearest and most intimate companion, Mary had not revealed it. To disguise his real feelings, Bruce was outwardly less marked in his attention to his betrothed than to her friend; and, in her susceptibility and innocent confidence, Bessy Bell too readily mistook his kind assiduities for marks of affection and proofs of love. A new spirit began to pervade her whole being, almost unknown to herself; she looked on the scenes around her with other eyes; and life changed in the hues it had previously borne to the gaze of her imagination. In the absence of Bruce she became melancholy and abstracted. He seemed to her the being who had been born to render her blessed; and futurity appeared, without his presence, like the melancholy gloom of a November morning.

The physiological doctrine of temperaments we leave to its difficulties; although we confess, that in Bessy Bell and Mary Gray something spoke in the way of illustration.

Her

The countenance of Bessy was one of light and sunshine. eyes were blue, her hair flaxen, her complexion florid. She might have sate for a picture of Aurora. Every thing about her spoke of "the innocent brightness of the new-born day." Mary Gray was in many things the reverse of this, although perhaps equally beautiful. Her features were more regular; she was taller, even more elegant in figure; and had in her almost colourless cheeks, lofty pale brow, and raven ringlets, a majesty which nature had denied to her unconscious rival. The one was all buoyancy and smiles; the other subdued passion, deep feeling, and quiet reflection.