'I am surprised, my dearest Abeillard, that, contrary to the usual style of epistolary correspondence, and even contrary to the obvious order of things, you would presume, in the very front of your salutation, to put my name before your own. It was preferring a woman to a man, a wife to her husband, a nun to a monk or priest, and a deaconness to an abbot.-Decency and good order require that, when we write to our superiors or our equals, the names of those to whom we write, should have the first place. But in writing to inferiors, they are first mentioned who are first in dignity.' She then gives him a reprimand for speaking of his own death, a subject too dreadful for his daughters, the good nuns of the Paraclet, to be thought of. Again let me intreat you to be more considerate for the sake of us all: at least, on my account, do refrain from all expressions which, like the shafts of death, penetrate my soul. The mind, worn down by grief, is a stranger to repose: plunged in troubles it is little able to think on God. To him you have devoted our lives: and will you impede his service? It were to be wished that every necessary event, which brings sorrow with it, might take place when least expected: for what cannot be avoided by human foresight, when permitted to torment us, only raises unavailing fears. Full of this thought the poet Lucan thus petitions heaven: Sit subitum quodcunque paras; sit cæca futuri Mens hominum fati: liceat sperare timenti! 'But if I lose you, what have I to hope for! you are my only comfort; deprived of that, shall I still drag on my miserable pilgrimage? But even in you, what comfort have I, save only the thought that you are still living? All other joys are forbidden to me. may not be allowed to see you, that my soul might sometimes, at least, return into its own bosom. She complains pathetically of her hard fate. I In prosperity and in adversity my life has known no measure. My happiness was unbounded; so is my affliction. Hanging over my melancholy state, I shed the more tears, when I view the magnitude of my losses; but my tears redouble, when recollection tells me, how dear those pleasures were which I have lost. To the greatest joys have succeeded the greatest sorrows. And that my condition, it seems, might be absolutely desperate, even the common rules of equity have been perverted in our regard. For while we pursued illicit pleasures, divine justice was indulgent to us. No sooner was this reformed, and the holy bond of marriage united us, than the hand of God became heavy on us. 'Having lowered yourself to raise me, and thus given dignity to me and all my family, what more could be required? All guilt was cancelled before God and man.-Why was I born to be the occasion of so black a perfidy! But such has ever been the baneful Hence the caution of influence of women on the greatest men. the wise man against us. (Prov. vii. 24.) 'Eve, our first mother, drove her husband from Paradise. Heaven gave her to be his helpmate, but soon she became his destruction.-Delila was alone strong enough to vanquish that brave Nazarean, whose birth an angel had foretold. She delivered him to his enemies. When deprived of sight he was no longer able to support the load of misery, involved in one common ruin he expired with his enemies.-Solomon, the wisest of men, was so infatuated by a woman, the daughter of the king of Egypt, as even, in the decline of life, to become an idolater. In preference to his father, who was a just man, he had been chosen to build a temple to the Lord: that Lord he had publicly announced by word and in writing, and he had taught his worship; but that worship he deserted.-Job, that man of piety, had to endure the severest of all his conflicts from his wife. She instigated him to curse God. The arch-temper well knew what experience had often taught him, that the most compendious way to destroy a husband, was to employ the artifice of his wife. 'His usual malice he tried also upon us. He had failed in his attempt while our union was unlawful; therefore he had recourse to matrimony. He was not permitted, from our evil conduct, to work our ruin; but he drew it from a source which was holy.' It is impossible not to be interested by the following eloquent confession. 'I will disclose to you all the secret weaknesses of my unhappy heart. Tell me then: can I hope to appease the divine anger; I, who, at every moment, am charging heaven with cruelty? My murmurs may draw on me greater vengeance: the sorrow, at least, of such a penitent will not avert it. But why do I talk of penitence? While the mind retains all its former attachments to sin; what avails the external language of grief? It is, indeed, easy to confess one's faults; it is easy to put on the imposing garb of penitence: but, Oh God! how hard it is to tear the mind from those affections, which were once so dear! For this reason, when the holy Job had said; "I will loosen my tongue to speak against myself," that is, I will accuse myself of my faults, I will confess my sins; he immediately adds: "I will speak in the bitterness of my soul." These words the blessed Gregory has expounded: "There are many, says he, who readily acknowledge their faults; but they know not what it is to grieve: what should be a subject of tears, they relate with a face of joy." He therefore who, in real detestation, declares his sins, must do it in the bitterness of his heart: his compunction must at once punish what his tongue is made to utter. 'How rare this penitential sorrow is, St. Ambrose has also told us. "I have found more, says he, who have preserved their innocence, than who have recovered it by penitence."-So fascinating were the pleasures we once indulged; the thought of them cannot give me pain, nor can I efface their impression. Wherever I turn my eyes, in all their charms, there are they present to me. Even in my dreams the dear phantoms hover round me. During the celebration of the august mysteries, when the soul, on the wings of prayer, should rise more pure to heaven, the same importunate ideas haunt my wretched soul: they seize every avenue to my heart. When I should grieve for what is past; I only sigh that the same pleasures return no more. My mind has been too faithful to its impressions: it holds up to the imagination every circumstance of pleasure, and all the scenes of past joys play wantonly before me. 'I know, the strong workings of my mind, sometimes even betray themselves on my countenance. I am heard to utter words, which escape unthinkingly from me.-How wretched is my condition! To me surely may be applied those plaintive expressions of the apostle; "miserable mortal that I am, who will free me from this body of death?" Could I but add with truth; "the grace of God through Jesus Christ our Lord!" This grace, my dearest Abeillard, you are possessed of: it has been peculiarly indulgent to you. Even the very circumstance, which we consider as an instance of great severity, does but announce the paternal goodness of God: like a skilful physician who, to cure his patient, does not spare the knife. I have to combat the fervour of youth, and that burning flame, which the indulgence of pleasure, has raised within me. My arms are but that poor de fence, which weak female nature can supply. 'They, who cannot look into my soul, think me virtuous; they think me chaste, because my external actions are such; when surely this amiable virtue only dwells within the mind. The world may praise me; but before God I am worthless. He is the searcher of hearts, and his eye penetrates into the inmost thoughts. I am deemed virtuous in an age, when religion too generally wears the cloak of hypocrisy; when he is most loudly praised, whose actions do not shock the public eye. Indeed, the man, perhaps, may deserve some commendation, even before God, who, whatever be his motive, abstains from those practices, which are a scandal to the church, which expose the name of God to the blaspheming tongues of the wicked, and by which worldlings are induced to ridicule the sacred institutes of religion. This is, at least, a small effect of divine grace, from which proceeds not only the power to do good, but also that of abstaining from doing evil. Yet, after all, what avails the latter without the former? It is written, " decline from *Far other dreams my erring soul employ, &c. line. 223. ib. 184. Ah wretch, believed the spouse of God, in vain Confessed within the slave of love, of love and man, &c. ib. 177. evil, and do good." And even both can have no pretension to a reward, unless they be done from the motive of pleasing God. Through the whole course of my life, heaven knows what have been my dispositions! It was you, and not God, whom I feared most to offend; you, and not God, I was most anxious to please. My mind is still unaltered. It was not love of him, but solely your command, that drew me to the cloister. How miserable then my condition, if, undergoing so much, I have no prospect of a reward hereafter! By external show, you, like others, have been deceived; you ascribed to the impressions of religion what sprang from another source. Thus you recommend yourself to my prayers, in hopes of finding that succour which I look for from you.' If these letters be genuine, and we see no cause to doubt it, they show Heloisa to have been a woman of very extraordinary mind as well as ungovernable passions, who loved 'not wisely, but too well,' who, in the midst of an unenlightened age attained to a degree of mental improvement, that would even now be respectable, and surrounded by a selfish and vicious society, devoted herself a willing victim to that noble and disinterested passion which, under happier circumstances, would have made her a model of female virtue. With all her faults, she has been more sinned against than sinning, and her name has been most unfairly sacrificed by Pope, for the sake of enhancing the poetical glory of his own. ART. V.-Thoughts on the weather, by Professor Bode. [From the New Monthly Magazine.] THOUGH the inhabitants of our island are, I believe, pretty generally said by foreigners to be more frequent and anxious inquirers after the state of the weather than any other people in Europe, and this again has been adduced as sufficient proof of the peculiar inconstancy of our climate, I cannot but think that we are neither more anxious about the weather, nor have more reason to be so, than most of the nations of the north of Europe. It is, perhaps, not an uninteresting remark, that the southern nations of Europe content themselves with the same word to express both time and weather; whereas the northern have a distinct word for the weather, which may be considered as a proof of the importance they attach to it. Not to dwell too long on a point for eign to my present purpose, I proceed to give you an account of Mr. Bode's instructive and entertaining pamphlet, just published On the at Berlin, under the title of Thoughts on the Weather. title is the very appropriate motto- While the earth remaineth, seed time, and harvest, and cold and heat, and summer and winter, and day and night, shall not cease.' Gen. viii, 22. The author says, ' People in general have very erroneous ideas respecting the course of the weather. They commonly fancy that it originates at a very great distance from our earth, by the powerful influence of the principal celestial bodies, and that its effects and consequences extend to large tracts of country, nay, even to whole continents, and that they produce general changes in the The author thinks that this is the great economy of Nature.' reason people expect or desire prophecies respecting the weather from astronomers, whose researches, according to appearances, (fallacious indeed,) are directed to the same regions; but that it is the business of the chymical meteorologist only to examine into the physical causes of the inconstant, and often rapidly changing course of the weather. But he gives the astronomer some hints towards a more solid judgment on this natural phenomenon, from 'We go too far to a higher and more suitable point of view. look for the physical acting powers, which determine the course of the weather; but they lie extremely close to us, and we are continually surrounded with the chymical processes of their elements. The highest clouds of vapour and rain, borne by the air, do not pass above half a (German, two and a half English) mile over our heads, for the summits of the loftiest mountains, which, however, are not seven-eighths of a mile in perpendicular height, rise far above all such clouds. The universal air magazine of nature, or what we call the atmosphere, is formed within these cloudy regions, and receives, in continual exhalations, all the animal, vegetable, and mineral ingredients, detached from the surface of the terraqueous globe, developed and dissolved into the most subtile particles. Thus various kinds of gases are generated, which, by means of chymical mixtures and precipitations, change them into rain, snow, hail, dew, mist, &c. and impelled by the winds, return them to earth as a fertilizing moisture. But this whole atmosphere, in comparison with the entire mass of the paper earth, amounts to little more than the thickness of a piece of pasted on a globe one foot in diameter, or than the moisture which appears upon it, when it is removed in winter from a cold room to a warm one. All the phenomena of the air and weather are generated in this exundation of the earth, and therefore, if small portions of the earth suffer by them, yet the general economy of Væder. |