to the dead,--to revive the beauty, the virtue that are no more;
to wreathe chaplets that outlive the day around the urn which were else
forgotten by the world!

When the poet mourns, in his immortal verse, for the dead, tell me not
that fame is in his mind! It is filled by thoughts, by emotions that
shut out the living. He is breathing to his genius--to that sole and
constant friend which has grown up with him from his cradle--the sorrows
too delicate for human sympathy! and when afterwards he consigns the
confession to the crowd, it is indeed from the hope of honour--, honour
not for himself, but for the being that is no more.

CHAPTER XVII. LETTER FROM TREVYLYAN TO -----.

COBLENTZ.

I AM obliged to you, my dear friend, for your letter; which, indeed, I
have not, in the course of our rapid journey, had the leisure, perhaps
the heart, to answer before. But we are staying in this town for some
days, and I write now in the early morning, ere any one else in our
hotel is awake. Do not tell me of adventure, of politics, of intrigues;
my nature is altered. I threw down your letter, animated and brilliant
as it was, with a sick and revolted heart. But I am now in somewhat less
dejected spirits. Gertrude is better,--yes, really better; there is a
physician here who gives me hope; my care is perpetually to amuse,
and never to fatigue her,--never to permit her thoughts to rest upon
herself. For I have imagined that illness cannot, at least in the
unexhausted vigour of our years, fasten upon us irremediably unless we
feed it with our own belief in its existence. You see men of the
most delicate frames engaged in active and professional pursuits, who
literally have no time for illness. Let them become idle, let them take
care of themselves, let them think of their health--and they die! The
rust rots the steel which use preserves; and, thank Heaven, although
Gertrude, once during our voyage, seemed roused, by an inexcusable
imprudence of emotion on my part, into some suspicion of her state,
yet it passed away; for she thinks rarely of herself,--I am ever in her
thoughts and seldom from her side, and you know, too, the sanguine and
credulous nature of her disease. But, indeed, I now hope more than I
have done since I knew her.

When, after an excited and adventurous life which had comprised so
many changes in so few years, I found myself at rest in the bosom of a
retired and remote part of the c