ealthful sleep of
youth. And oh! let Youth cherish that happiest of earthly boons while
yet it is at its command;--for there cometh the day to all, when
"neither the voice of the lute or the birds"

[Quotation from Horace]

shall bring back the sweet slumbers that fell on their young eyes, as
unbidden as the dews. It is a dark epoch in a man's life when Sleep
forsakes him; when he tosses to and fro, and Thought will not be
silenced; when the drug and draught are the courters of stupefaction,
not sleep; when the down pillow is as a knotted log; when the eyelids
close but with an effort, and there is a drag and a weight, and a
dizziness in the eyes at morn. Desire and Grief, and Love, these are the
young man's torments, but they are the creatures of Time; Time removes
them as it brings, and the vigils we keep, "while the evil days come
not," if weary, are brief and few. But Memory, and Care, and Ambition,
and Avarice, these are the demon-gods that defy the Time that fathered
them. The worldlier passions are the growth of mature years, and their
grave is dug but in our own. As the dark Spirits in the Northern tale,
that watch against the coming of one of a brighter and holier race, lest
if he seize them unawares, he bind them prisoners in his chain, they
keep ward at night over the entrance of that deep cave--the human
heart--and scare away the angel Sleep!

BOOK II.

CHAPTER I.

THE MARRIAGE SETTLED.--LESTER'S HOPES AND SCHEMES.--GAIETY OF
TEMPER A GOOD SPECULATION.--THE TRUTH AND FERVOUR OF
ARAM'S LOVE.

Love is better than a pair of spectacles, to make
every thing seem greater which is seen through it.
--Sir Philip Sydney's Arcadia.

Aram's affection to Madeline having now been formally announced to
Lester, and Madeline's consent having been somewhat less formally
obtained, it only remained to fix the time for their wedding. Though
Lester forbore to question Aram as to his circumstances, the Student
frankly confessed, that if not affording what the generality of persons
would consider even a competence, they enabled one of his moderate
wants and retired life to dispense, especially in the remote and cheap
district in which they lived, with all fortune in a wife, who, like
Madeline, was equally with himself enamoured of obscurity. The good
Lester, however, proposed to bestow upon his daughter such a portion
as might allow for the wants of