outh, and in my memory she will ever be young and
beautiful." Truly, not an unhappy fate as the world goes,--to live thus
in the memory of such a man. What would years and cares and the
commonplace of existence have done for such a love as this, we wonder?
We shall never know. But we have all seen loves apparently as pure and
as strong, worn away by the attritions of life,--by the daily labor for
daily bread, by little incessant worries and faults and foibles upon the
part of one or both,--until there was nothing left of the early color of
romance; only a faded web of life where once was cloth of gold. How
sweet to many a faded and careworn woman would be the thought of being
always young and beautiful to the man she loved. Fortunate Matilda
Hoffman of the olden time!

In 1817 he went again to Europe, and while there definitely made up his
mind to look upon literature as his profession,--an almost unheard of
thing in America at that time. He writes to his brother:--

"For a long while past I have lived almost entirely at home,
sometimes not leaving the house for two or three days, and yet I
have not had an hour pass heavily; so that if I could see my
brothers around me prospering, and be relieved from this cloud that
hangs over us all, I feel as if I could be contented to give up all
the gayeties of life; I certainly think that no hope of gain,
however flattering, would tempt me again into the cares and sordid
concerns of traffic. . . . In protracting my stay in Europe, I
certainly do not contemplate pleasure, for I look forward to a life
of loneliness and of parsimonious and almost painful economy."

Some time after this he wrote to a friend:--

"Your picture of domestic enjoyment indeed raises my envy. With all
my wandering habits, which are the result of circumstances rather
than of disposition, I think I was formed for an honest, domestic,
uxorious man; and I cannot hear of my old cronies snugly nestled
down with good wives and fine children round them, but I feel for
the moment desolate and forlorn. Heavens! what a hap-hazard,
schemeless life mine has been, that here I should be at this time
of life, youth slipping away, and scribbling month after month, and
year after year, far from home, without any means or prospect of
entering into matrimony, which I absolutely believe indispensable
to the happiness and e