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Long Engagements.
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in vain she reminds her that her happiness is more easily perilled than man's; that her susceptibilities are keener, that her sufferings will be greater, that her risks are a thousand-fold more numerous. Love fashions a fool's-cap out of his madrigals to bind it upon Reason's brow, and from that hour she passes for Folly.

Goldsmith's "Citizen of the World" quaintly remarks that "marriage has been compared to a game of skill for life; it is generous, then, in both parties to declare that they are sharpers in the beginning. In England, I am told, both sides use every art to conceal their defects from each other before marriage, and the rest of their lives may be regarded as doing penance for their former dissimulation."

Is this a malicious slander or a rudely-expressed truth? Are not lovers, all the world over, zealously engaged in cheating each other? Does not the very state of mental exaltation, produced by an absorbing affection give birth to unpremeditated deception? Nay, has not love, in the dawn of its existence, a beautifying influence upon the whole constitution of man's soul? Are not commonplace minds elevated and rendered poetic by its refining power? What, then, must be its effect upon spirits of finer mould!

The period of an open, prosperous betrothal is the blossoming season of life. The sun of a pure passion calls forth the fairest flowers upon every

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