d only added to
the music of existence, as the lesser discords admitted into some
perfect symphony, fitly resolved, add richness and strength to the
whole harmonious movement. It was a deep wound that Fate, had
inflicted on him; nay, it seemed like a mortal one; but the weapon was
clean, and its edge was smooth. Such wounds must heal with time in
healthy natures, whatever a false sentiment may say, by the wise and
beneficent law of our being. The recollection of a deep and true
affection, is rather a divine nourishment for a life to grow strong
upon than a poison to destroy it.

Dudley Venner's habitual sadness could not be laid wholly to his early
bereavement. It was partly the result of the long struggle between
natural affection and duty, on one side, and the involuntary
tendencies these had to overcome, on the other,--between hope and
fear, so long in conflict that despair itself would have been like an
anodyne, and he would have slept upon some final catastrophe with the
heavy sleep of a bankrupt after his failure is proclaimed. Alas! some
new affection might perhaps rekindle the fires of youth in his heart;
but what power could calm that haggard terror of the parent which rose
with every morning's sun and watched with every evening star,--what
power save alone that of him who comes bearing the inverted torch, and
leaving after him only the ashes printed with his footsteps?

* * * * *

THE ELECTION IN NOVEMBER.

While all of us have been watching, with that admiring sympathy which
never fails to wait on courage and magnanimity, the career of the new
Timoleon in Sicily,--while we have been reckoning, with an interest
scarcely less than in some affair of personal concern, the chances and
changes that bear with furtherance or hindrance upon the fortune of
united Italy, we are approaching, with a quietness and composure which
more than anything else mark the essential difference between our own
form of democracy and any other yet known in history, a crisis in our
domestic policy more momentous than any that has arisen since we
became a nation. Indeed, considering the vital consequences for good
or evil that will follow from the popular decision in November, we
might be tempted to regard the remarkable moderation which has thus
far characterized the Presidential canvass as a guilty indifference to
the duty implied in the privilege of suffrage, or a stolid
unconsciousness of the resul