tracted lover went on, appear to me to trudge on in one and the same round: we rise in the morning that we may eat breakfast, dinner, and supper, and go to bed again that we may get up the next morning and do the same; so that you never saw two peas more alike than our yesterday and to-day." If he had nothing to tell, he had plenty to ask. A jury of lovers would have pronounced his situation serious in the extreme. He was enamoured of a beauty and an heiress: she in the full lustre of her charms; he a youth not twenty, of small estate heavily burdened, reading the elementary book of a profession requiring years of preparation. Moreover, he had the usual dream of foreign travel. Before settling to the business of life, he meant to visit England, Holland, France, Spain, Italy, where he would buy "a good fiddle," -and then cross to Egypt, returning home by the way of the St. Lawrence and Canada. Such a tour would require two or three years. Would she wait? Could he ask her to wait? She must love him very much to do that, and he did not know that she loved him at all; for the watch-paper meant nothing particular, indicating friendly feeling, nothing more. What would dear Page advise? Should he go at once to town, receive his sentence, and end this awful suspense? Inclination prompted this course; but, if she rejected him, he would be "ten times more wretched than ever." In this dilemma, he had some thoughts of going to Petersburg, "if the actors go there in May," and keeping on to Williamsburg for the birth-night ball at the Apollo, which of course she would attend. But, after all, had not he and Page better go abroad at once for a two or three years' tour? "If we should not both be cured of love in that time, I think the devil would be in it." He remained at home, however, all that winter and all the ensuing summer, wrestling with love and Coke, writing long letters to Page on the one, and long notes on the other in his blank-books. Page, though he was as far gone in love as Jefferson, tried to act as his friend's attorney in love; and Jefferson, on his part, reflected much on Page's "case," and favored him with sage advice. And so the affair went on nearly all that year. "The test of a woman is gold," says poor Richard, "and the test of a man is woman." This young man bore the test well. He was not carried away, even by this first yearning passion, but held firmly to his purposes, making his love subordinate to them. After viewing the subject in every light, he could only come to this wise conclusion: If she said Yes, he should be happy; but, "if she does not, I must endeavor to be as much so as possible." He then bestows upon his fellow-sufferer a discourse upon the necessity of fortifying the mind against inevitable strokes of ill-fortune. "The only method of doing this," he remarks, "is to assume a perfect resignation to the Divine Will; to consider that whatever does happen must happen, and that by our uneasiness we cannot prevent the blow before it does fall, but we may add to its force after it has fallen." This attitude of mind, which he recommends to his friend in several rotund and solemn sentences, will enable a man to tread the thorny path of life with "a pious and unshaken resignation." He ends this discourse with a sentence which reminds us that Dr. Johnson was then a power in the world: "Few things will disturb him at all; nothing will disturb him much." The lover had occasion for all his philosophy. In October, when the General Court convened, he must needs be in Williamsburg, to watch its proceedings, and submit knotty questions to his friend Wythe. He flew thither on the wings of love. There was a ball at the Apollo. He met her there. Who so happy as he when he led her out to the dance? He had made up his mind to speak, if opportunity favored; and he had meditated some moving passages, which he hoped would touch her heart, and call forth the response he desired. But, alas! when at length, after so many months of longing, the moment arrived, and he had her tête-à-tête, he could only stammer a few broken sentences, with dreadful pauses between them; which elicited no explicit reply, and had no result except to plunge him into the depths of shame and despair. "For God's sake, COME," he writes to Page, who had not yet arrived. He met her again. The fearful subject was again approached. This time he got on a little better; explained his projects; did not put the question, but gave her to understand that he should do so in due time. Girls of spirit are not won in that manner, and we may presume she did not flatter his hopes; for when next he wrote to his friend, he calls the capital of Virginia, the scene of his disaster, by the name of "Devilsburg." The probability is, that the young lady was engaged at the time, since, a few months after the tête-à-tête in the Apollo, she was married to that dread beinganother! Page, too, seems to have been crossed in love but he immediately consoled himself by courting-another, Poor love-sick Jefferson declared he would not believe the tale till he had heard it from Page himself. For his own part, he had been perfectly sure, during the whole course of his love, that, if Belinda rejected him, his heart was dead to love forever; and he wanted to know his fate as soon as possible, that, if doomed to disappointment, he might have "more of life to wear it off." How captivating to lovers is the poetry of love! It was during these two or three years of longing that London ships were bringing to Virginia, among the other new publications, volumes of the poems of Ossian, invested with the halo of a London celebrity, soon to become European. Burly Johnson, tyrant of Great Britain, had not yet denounced them as forgeries; and all the reading world accepted them as genuine relics of antiquity. In these poems there is much which could not but have impressed a youth who had listened spell-bound to the melodious oratory of an Indian chief, of which he understood not a word, and gazed with such interest upon the scene of the various groups of listeners, each group by its own fire, and the full-orbed moon shining over all. It was an Ossian scene. But he was now a lovelorn young man; and Ossian contains on almost every page some picture of beauty in distress, some utterance of passion or tenderness, which lovers can easily make their own. "Daura, my daughter, thou wert fair, -fair as the moon on Fara, white as the driven snow, sweet as the breathing gale." So was Belinda. "Her fair bosom is seen from her robe, as the moon from the clouds of night, when its edge heaves white on the view from the darkness which covers its orb." He had often observed this fine effect when dancing at the Apollo with Belinda, arrayed in the bodice of the period. "Fair was she, the daughter of the mighty Conlock. She appeared like a sunbeam among women." Precisely the observation he had frequently made to Page, when glorious Belinda appeared, surrounded by her excellent but commonplace friends. "Often met their eyes of love." Rapturous thought! Would it ever be any thing more than a thought? Tradition has not recorded the color of Belinda's hair; but whether it were of the hue of the "raven's wing," or "dark brown," or of some lighter shade; whether she wore her hair "flowing," or "wandering," or in some other touching style, he had not far to go in Ossian without meeting a damsel similarly adorned, with the additional resemblance of white hands and snowy arms. It belongs to youth to abandon itself to these literary raptures; but there has seldom been a case of such lasting fascination as this. He could not get over it. His passion for Ossian long outlived his love for Belinda. The fulminations of Dr. Johnson, if they were heard on this side of the Atlantic, could not shake his faith. It chanced that Charles MacPherson, a relative of the translator, visited Virginia a few years after, when Jefferson made his acquaintance, and, we may be sure, gave utterance to his enthusiasm. The longer he read the ancient poet, the more interested he became; and for ten years of his life, at least, he thought "this rude bard of the North the greatest poet that ever existed." His friends had but to start that topic to call from him the most animated discourse, interspersed with many a favorite passage, delivered with his bestelocution. Ossian had other American admirers. Some enthusiast, perhaps, it was who took the name of Selma from Ossian, and gave it to a town in Alabama, since become important, as another reader of poetry fancied the pretty name of Goldsmith's "Deserted Village," and called a village in New York, Auburn. With regard to other familiar authors, the student's preferences were such as we should expect,Shakspeare, Homer, Molière, Cervantes, and the old English songs and ballads. Copies of songs in his youthful hand are still preserved, simple old love-ditties that pleased the simple old generations. Fiction had not then become one of the fine arts, and he had little relish for any but the few immortal tales. Don Quixote, his descendants think, was the only fiction he ever read twice. CHAPTER VIII. COMING OF AGE. FORTUNATELY for love-sick swains, the affairs of this vulgar world go on, little as they may regard them; and, indeed, there is reason to surmise that our lover recovered his serenity very soon after he knew his fate. In his long letters to Page on their affairs of the heart, there is generally a saving clause like this, "The court is at hand, which I must attend constantly;" or this, "As I suppose you do not use your 'Statutes of Britain,' if you can lend them to me till I can provide myself with a copy, it will infinitely oblige me." During the period of his preparation for the bar, he usually spent the winter at the capital and the summer at home; working at both places, as he did everywhere and always, with a constancy, system, and cheerfulness, of which there have been few examples among the toiling sons of men. It was this that soon enabled him to play groomsman for happier friends with so much gayety, and contemplate John Page's fortunate suit without a sigh. If we possessed nothing of this part of his life but these familiar letters to John Page, wherein love and the Apollo are every thing to him, and Coke appears as an "old dull scoundrel," lying snugly packed in a trunk, we should be utterly deceived. Letters, indeed, though of eminent value as biographical material, are most misleading, unless we employ other means of information. In this respect they are like newspapers, which are a kind of digest of the letters of the time, and valuable as showing, not what occurred at a given period, but what was then thought to have occurred. The very exhaustion which results from long mental toil may cause a student to write in a strain of reckless audacity or rollicking merriment very unlike his habitual tone, as people who find themselves in extremely dismal circumstances sometimes aban - |