AN EARLY BEREAVEMENT. TRUE LOVE ITS OWN COMFORTER. A LONELY FATHER AND AN ONLY CHILD.
Read ye that run the aweful truth,
With which I charge my page;
A worm is in the bud of youth,
And at the root of age.
COWPER.
Leonard was not more than eight and twenty when he obtained a living, a few miles from Doncaster. He took his bride with him to the vicarage. The house was as humble as the benefice, which was worth less than £50. a year; but it was soon made the neatest cottage in the country round, and upon a happier dwelling the sun never shone. A few acres of good glebe were attached to it; and the garden was large enough to afford healthful and pleasurable employment to its owners. The course of true love never ran more smoothly; but its course was short.
O how this spring of love resembleth
The uncertain glory of an April day,
Which now shows all the beauty of the sun,
And by and by a cloud takes all away!1
Little more than five years from the time of their marriage had elapsed, before a headstone in the adjacent churchyard told where the remains of Margaret Bacon had been deposited in the 30th year of her age.
1 SHAKESPEARE.
When the stupor and the agony of that bereavement had past away, the very intensity of Leonard's affection became a source of consolation. Margaret had been to him a purely ideal object during the years of his youth; death had again rendered her such. Imagination had beautified and idolized her then; faith sanctified and glorified her now. She had been to him on earth all that he had fancied, all that he had hoped, all that he had desired. She would again be so in Heaven. And this second union nothing could impede, nothing could interrupt, nothing could dissolve. He had only to keep himself worthy of it by cherishing her memory, hallowing his heart to it while he performed a parent's duty to their child; and so doing to await his own summons, which must one day come, which every day was brought nearer, and which any day might bring.
——'Tis the only discipline we are born for;
All studies else are but as circular lines,
And death the centre where they must all meet.2
2 MASSINGER.
The same feeling which from his childhood had refined Leonard's heart, keeping it pure and undefiled, had also corroborated the natural strength of his character, and made him firm of purpose. It was a saying of Bishop Andrews that “good husbandry is good divinity;” “the truth whereof,” says Fuller, “no wise man will deny.” Frugality he had always practised as a needful virtue, and found that in an especial manner it brings with it its own reward. He now resolved upon scrupulously setting apart a fourth of his small income to make a provision for his child, in case of her surviving him, as in the natural course of things might be expected. If she should be removed before him,—for this was an event the possibility of which he always bore in mind,—he had resolved that whatever should have been accumulated with this intent, should be disposed of to some other pious purpose,—for such, within the limits to which his poor means extended, he properly considered this. And having entered on this prudential course with a calm reliance upon Providence in case his hour should come before that purpose could be accomplished, he was without any earthly hope or fear,—those alone excepted, from which no parent can be free.
The child had been christened Deborah after her maternal grandmother, for whom Leonard ever gratefully retained a most affectionate and reverential remembrance. She was a healthy, happy creature in body and in mind; at first
——one of those little prating girls
Of whom fond parents tell such tedious stories;3
afterwards, as she grew up, a favourite with the village school-mistress, and with the whole parish; docile, good-natured, lively and yet considerate, always gay as a lark and busy as a bee. One of the pensive pleasures in which Leonard indulged was to gaze on her unperceived, and trace the likeness to her mother.
Oh Christ!
How that which was the life's life of our being,
Can pass away, and we recall it thus!4
3 DRYDEN.
4 ISAAC COMNENUS.
That resemblance which was strong in childhood, lessened as the child grew up; for Margaret's countenance had acquired a cast of meek melancholy during those years in which the bread of bitterness had been her portion; and when hope came to her, it was that “hope deferred” which takes from the cheek its bloom, even when the heart instead of being made sick, is sustained by it. But no unhappy circumstances depressed the constitutional buoyancy of her daughter's spirits. Deborah brought into the world the happiest of all nature's endowments, an easy temper and a light heart. Resemblant therefore as the features were, the dissimilitude of expression was more apparent; and when Leonard contrasted in thought the sunshine of hilarity that lit up his daughter's face, with the sort of moonlight loveliness which had given a serene and saint-like character to her mother's, he wished to persuade himself that as the early translation of the one seemed to have been thus prefigured, the other might be destined to live for the happiness of others till a good old age, while length of years in their course should ripen her for heaven.