and ensure their prospects; and the pressure of affliction is scarcely felt before some new source of happiness invites that pursuit which conscious ability prompts them to follow; but the storm which assails the aged bends him to the ground: hope, once extinguished, springs up for him no more! He has neither time to realize its suggestions, nor activity to dare the attempt."-- Observing that his son made no effort to interrupt him, but seemed buried in profound thought, and inattentive to the purpose which he aimed at, he paused a moment, and then drew the portrait nearer to himself. He took his hand: "Your father, De Rosier, is that enfeebled man! Bending under age and misfortune, and the infirmities of the mind, accumulated before their time by the blandishments of prosperity, he looks up to you as the protector and comforter of his declining years. It is in your power to save him from disgrace, from penury, perhaps from death! and he hopes now

to

to prove, that his long and unremitting cares for your welfare have not been lavished on indifference or ingratitude." De Rosier felt the full force of all he owed him; he could not doubt the picture which he drew; he had indeed been the kindest of parents; he had often sacrificed his own wishes to his; he had studied to avert every affliction that hovered near him; and the recollection of his various acts of kindness, rushing at once upon his mind, accused him of apathy, in having so long remained silent to his pleadings. He fervently kissed the hand in which the Marquis still held his. "Never, never," said he impressively, "shall my father have cause to repent his goodness! never shall the stings of filial ingratitude be inflicted by me!"

"Ah! prove it then, my son," cried the Marquis, with tears starting in his eyes, (extorted by pity for his son's sufferings, contending against those selfinterested feelings which still urged him

to

but

to proceed;)" the case admits not of delay; your compliance may now be painful, reward will amply repay you for it,-the conscious reward of being the saviour of your father!".

your

Allow me a short time," replied De Rosier, in a voice hollow and tremulous with emotion, "to examine those sentiments by which my heart has been hitherto governed-it may be, that they are erroneous; it may be, that the feelings which shudder at the measure you propose are of less importance than the pleadings of filial duty, which would instruct me to renounce them; yet I would act from principle and conviction; not from the impulse of a perhaps-momentary heroism, which I might hereafter be unable to maintain.".

Saying these words he withdrew; and, shutting himself up in his own apartment, applied his mind to that solemn and strict self-examination which he judged neces

sary

sary before he ought to venture on an effort so important as reconciling opposite principles, the variance of which distracted his bosom, while it equally shocked him to think of preferring either. It has already been described, how his heart fondly cherished those romantic refinements of sentiment and feeling which commonly exist only in the first spring of youth, and which the experienced and aged know to be delusions;-which, if sometimes they give delight in prosperity, bring accumulations of wretchedness to adversity, unfelt by the disciple of sober reason, and unknown to the apathist.His ideas of love, or the union of hearts, glowed with the fervor and delicacy of a Petrarch's, and Petrarch, in the shades of Vaucluse, never clung with stronger passion to that solitude, which excluded every image but his Laura's, than did De Rosier to the fond delirium with which his widowed heart brooded over the memory of his wife, and sickened at the thought

of

of an union with another,that other too a stranger to him;-cold, insensible, perhaps, -accepting his hand by compulsion, or yielding from the indecision of indifference! What a contrast to the delicate though impassioned tenderness of his lost wife! De Rosier had found in her attachment something sacred and sublime.Its simplicity, its fervor, its bashful sensibility, its total abstraction from every selfish and interested motive, its reverence of its object, and the delightful dreams which it had inspired in his own bosom, were all sketched out before him in the most glowing colours of recent memory,all hostile to the sacrifice demanded of him.

But the claims of duty, the obligations of gratitude, the warm ties of filial-affection, which had with him lost nothing of the vivacity and submission of childhood, these were scarcely less vigorous in his bosom, and equally urgent to be obeyed.

The