, in the presence of truth? Yet not to respect them is to entail upon ourselves I know not what load of acrimony, contempt, and misery! I must speak—I never yet met a youth whom I thought so deserving of Anna St. Ives as Frank Henley! The obstacles you will say are insurmountable. Alas! I fear they are. And therefore 'tis fortunate that the same thought has not more strongly occurred

to you. Perhaps my caution would have been greater, but that I know your affections are free; and yet I confess I wonder that they are so. If it be the effect of your reason, the praise you merit is infinite: and I hope and believe it is; for, notwithstanding all the tales I have heard and read, my mind is convinced of nothing more firmly than that the passion of love is as capable of being repressed, and conquered, as any other passion whatever: and you know we have both agreed that the passions are all of them subject to reason, when reason is sufficiently determined to exert its power.
I have written a long letter; but, writing to you, I never know when to end.
Heaven bless my Anna St. Ives!
LOUISA CLIFTON.


FRANK HENLEY TO OLIVER TRENCHARD.
Wenbourne-Hill.
OLIVER, I am wretched! The feeble Frank Henley is a poor miserable being! The sun shines, the birds warble, the flowers spring, the buds are bursting into bloom, all nature rejoices; yet to me this mirth, this universal joy, seems mockery—Why is this? Why do

I suffer my mind thus to be pervaded by melancholy? Why am I thus steeped in gloom?
She is going—Thursday morning is the time fixed—And what is that to me?—Madman that I am!—Who am I? Does she, can she, ought she to think of me?—And why not? Am I not a man; and is she more than mortal?—She is! She is!—Shew me the mortal who presumes to be her equal!
But what do I wish? What would I have? Is it my intention or my desire to make her wretched? What! Sink her whom I adore in the estimation of the world; and render her the scoff of the foolish, the vain, and the malignant?—I!—I make her wretched!—I!—
Oliver, she treats me with indifference—

cold, calm, killing indifference! Yet kind, heavenly kind even in her coldness! Her cheerful eye never turns from me, nor ever seeks me. To her I am a statue—Would I were
