66 TO CECILIA IN HEAVEN. "Whom the Gods love die young." No stranger hand should sweep the lyre, To link its thought, or name, with thine. The guileless spirit turned to thee, In trust, unbaffled, sought thy side. For thou, while in the world, wert not Is cast, beyond its smile and storm. No sorrowing for the loved ones here Earth's shadow cast on heavenly light. "We know that thou hast passed to lands, The parent stem for thee must pine, "Earth had no love for him like thine, And that, and thou, are with the dead." A voice of wail goes up to heaven, LETTER XVI. TO AN UNFORTUNATE AND MISGUIDED FRIEND, Inserted in the vague hope that it may yet reach one, beguiled into a mesalliance of very doubtful legality, while in, (or near,) the state described by the old Scottish phrase, "A bee in the bonnet." MY OLD AND DEAR FRIEND: Louisiana, 1850. It is long, very long, since you and I have had any direct intercourse, and much easier to sever than reunite the chain of a broken correspondence, where the address is so precarious as ours; but I know you will gladly overlook some trifling annoyances, to hear once more the accents of kindness and affection from a friend of your youth. After repeated inquiries I have at length learned where you were at "the last advices," and that you "left under circumstances too painful and humiliating for the writer to disclose or me to learn;" but recollecting one of our later conversations, can readily divine that after your cousin Jane's decease, the house of her husband became a perfect Pandemonium to you, till wrongs, insults, and indignities without name or redress drove you at last to desperation. For "desperation," indeed, it is, my dear Aline, for weak, powerless woman to rebel, in the smallest iota, against the conventionalities established for her perpetual subjugation; and well is it for her, that there is ONE TRIBUNAL still to which she can appeal from the injustice of man's dominion, ONE BAR where the servant is free from his master, and the oppressor held responsible as well as his victim. You, my dear unfortunate friend, were incapable of reflecting calmly upon this or any other subject, when, in the madness of passion or frenzy of despair, you descended from your station in life and wedded your fate to the Prof. of Animal Magnetism, said to have gained such "complete MESMERIC CONTROL over you" in a chamber of sickness which you could not with propriety shun. If this were so, you certainly were not a free moral agent, and ought not to be held responsible as such, though the cold, carping, busy world has no time for such nice discriminations between the "sinned against" and the sinning. But oh, these "sir owls " that sit in the arcana of science, and slumber and sneer on the confines of a mighty mystery, why, why will they not arouse to investigate and define the laws that govern this subtle agency? If a half-crazy philosophy has caught the inkling of a magnificent truth, and diffused it through a world of chimera, it surely is not the part of wisdom to leave it there in sole possession of visionaries and charlatans. Your companion is, it seems, one of its professed exponents, but as I make no inuendo insinuations and mean no unprovoked and useless outrage on his feelings, or wanton insult to your own, you, at least, must excuse my seeming-remember it is only seeming-cruelty in saying, that I too think it just possible, (under existing circumstances,) that you may not be his lawful wife. Forgive, forgive, I know how deeply I wound, and would to God I could present these unpalatable truths in a less painful light; but as sure as there are immortal interests at stake, I almost hope you are not, though otherwise, I know that not the purity of an angel of light could shield you from the imputation of occupying what all men, with a scarce repressed sneer, would call "a not very equivocal position," while all women would cry "amen," though less perhaps from innate conviction than the selfish, ignoble instinct of self-preservation. I say all women, because the few who would dare, (or care,) to be just, are seldom in a position to make their remonstrance felt. But when this mental hallucination shall have passed away, and this mystic influence have exhausted its power, as soon or late it most surely will, and old habits of life and modes of thought begin to resume their accustomed sway, then your proud, sensitive spirit will chafe "like a lion in the toils," and this is one reason why I hope you are not bound for life to one, who, in the pride of human intellect, has, I am told, taught you to deride your Maker, and scoff at the name of your Redeemer. Oh Aline! Aline! can this be so? Alas, I fear it may; for am not I, too, guilty, most guilty of having, in days that are past, fostered your incipient doubts by so freely expressing my own. I was older than yourself and should have reflected oftener than I did, that if there were no reality there could be no counterfeit. And yet it was never the occasional aberrations inseparable from human weakness, nor even the impious and systematic hypocrisy exhibited in "the high places of the sanctuary, that made me once doubt what religion was, half so much as the preposterous and abstruse metaphysics, "crammed into my youthful ears against the stomach of my sense." It is much to be regretted, that some zealous modern religionists should labor so hard to supersede the Apostolic definition of that religion which is "pure and undefiled before God and the Father;" however, you will learn my sentiments on that head from the inclosed soliloquy.* True, you may not think it either learned, poetic, or wise; but you and I are not wise, Aline, at least I am not, and I have no present so do not destroy my future. Life has to me been a weary warfare; after suffering and toil there must needs be repose, and where else can we moor our shattered, tempest-tossed barks more securely than on the Rock of Ages? "Man must have some belief," says the melancholy but gifted priest of Apis, so I say, with the dying mother to her noble but misguided son, "CHARLES, CHARLES! give me back my FAITH-give me back my hope of heaven!" You too need higher consolation than earth has to impart; for I know that you have suffered-that you are wretched! The delirium, or the torpor of excitement cannot last forever; the reaction, with its "after hour of gloom," must come, and the bitter pang of selfreproach, or distrust, mingle with the sad, sad tears that fall over the blight of your early promise. May God and you forgive me for having left you to struggle alone against such talents and influence as were combined for the subversion of your faith in all moral excellence! The atrocious and unnatural villain! I can scarce say, God forgive him; for this is his work-his! He took *Piece entitled, "What is Truth." |