Upheld by the intoxicating power of senseless romance, not by confidence in God, nor even by the reality of the patriotism that I persuaded myself was at the root of it all, I bore to see that beloved companion of my life depart for the scene of most bloody conflict. He was not nearly full grown; a blooming beautiful boy, reared, and up to that time tenderly guarded under the parental roof, in almost exclusive companionship with me. There was indeed but one heart between us, and neither could fancy what it would be to rejoice or to suffer alone. Of this I had given a proof in the preceding year. He took the measles and was exceedingly ill, and great precautions were used to preserve me from the infection; but, unable to brook a separation from him, I baffled their vigilance, burst into his apartment, and laying my cheek to his, resisted for a while all efforts to remove me. To my infinite delight I sickened immediately, and considered it an ample compensation for all attendant suffering, that I was allowed to sit constantly in the same room with him.
How strong, how sweet, how sacred is the tie that binds an only sister to an only brother, when they have been permitted to grow up together untrammelled by the heartless forms of fashion; unrivalled by alien claimants in their confiding affection; undivided in study, in sport, and in interest. Some object, that such union renders the boy too effeminate and the girl too masculine. In our case it did neither. He was the manliest, the hardiest, most decided, most intrepid character imaginable; but in manners sweet, gentle, and courteous, as they will be who are accustomed to look with protecting tenderness on an associate weaker than themselves. And as for me, though I must plead guilty to the charge of being more healthy, more active, and perhaps more energetic, than young ladies are usually expected to be, still I never was considered unfeminine; and the only peculiarity resulting from this constant companionship with one of the superior sex, was to give me a high sense of that superiority, with a habit of deference to man's judgment and submission to man's authority, which I am quite sure God intended the woman to yield. Every way has this fraternal tie been a rich blessing to me. The love that grew with us from our cradles never knew diminution from time or distance. Other ties were formed, but they did not supersede or weaken this. Death tore away all that was mortal and perishable, but this tie he could not sunder. As I loved him while he was on earth, so do I love him now that he is in heaven; and while I cherish in his sons the living likeness of what he was, my heart evermore yearns towards him where he is.
Parents are wrong to check as they do the outgoings of fraternal affection, by separating those whom God has especially joined as the offspring of one father and one mother. God has beautifully mingled them, by sending now a babe of one sex, now of the other, and suiting, as any careful observer may discern, their various characters to form a domestic whole. The parents interpose, packing off the boys to some school where no softer influence exists to round off, as it were, the rugged points of the masculine disposition, and where they soon lose all the delicacy of feeling peculiar to a brother's regard, and learn to look on the female character in a light wholly subversive of the frankness, the purity, the generous care for which earth can yield no substitute, and the loss of which only transforms him who ought to be the tender preserver of woman into her heartless destroyer. The girls are either grouped at home, with the blessed privilege of a father's eye still upon them, or sent away in a different direction from their brothers, exposed through unnatural and unpalatable restraints, to evils not perhaps so great, but every whit as wantonly incurred as the others. The shyness, miscalled retiring modesty, with which one young lady shrinks from the notice of a gentleman as though there were danger in his approach, and the conscious coquettish air, miscalled ease, with which another invites his notice, are alike removed from the reality of either modesty or ease. Both result from a fictitious mode of education —both are the consequences of nipping in the bud those sisterly feelings that lay a fair foundation for the right use of those privileges to which she looks forward as a member of society; and if the subject be viewed through the clear medium of Christian principle, its lights will become more brilliant, its shadows more dark, the longer and the closer we contemplate it.
LETTER IV.
YOUTH.
Hitherto you have not heard of any spiritually minded person connected with my early life; yet there was one, I feel sure, though my recollections are confused and imperfect on that point; and one to whose prayers, if not to her teaching, I surely owe something.
My father's mother was a fine, sprightly, robust old lady, rather small in stature, and already bending a little under the burden of years at the time when I first recollect her as mingling in the visions of my childhood, though I know that even from infancy I was the delight of her warm honest heart. She was simplicity itself in manners, her blunt speeches sometimes clashing a little with her son's notions of polish and refinement, as also did her inveterate antipathy to the reigning fashion, whatever that might be. I remember her reading me a lecture upon something novel in the cut of a sleeve, ending by this remark: "I never wore a gown but of one shape; and because I don't follow the fashion, the fashion is forced to come to me sometimes by way of a change. I can't help that, you know, my dear; but I never was fashionable on purpose." She added some pious remarks on vanity and folly, which I soon forgot; but the other dwelt on my mind because it chimed in with my own love of independence—a prominent characteristic with me; too often carried to the excess of self-willed obstinacy. However, I dearly loved and exceedingly respected my grand mother, and used in my heart to glory in her smooth clean locks, half brown, half grey, combed down from under a snowy cap of homely make, when she had successfully resisted alike the entreaties and examples of contemporary dames, who submitted their heads to the curling-irons and powder-puff of a frizeur, preparatory to an evening party. I used to stand proudly at her knee, admiring the high color of her cheek, and uncommon brilliancy of her fine dark hazle eye, while her voice, remarkably rich and clear, involuntarily swelled the chorus parts of our magnificent music.
She was a Percy, not by name, for that had been lost in the female line some generations before, but the pedigree in my possession shows how just was her vaunt in that respect. For vaunt it she did, to us at least, often bringing it forward to check any tendency to behavior unbefitting those who claimed descent from
"The stout earl of Northumberland,"
with whom I ought to be well acquainted, for the singing of Chevy Chace in proper time and tune with her, was the only secular accomplishment in which my dear grandmother personally labored to perfect me, except knitting and curious old-fashioned needlework. The pride of ancestry took strong hold of my mind, and such an ancestry accorded but too well with my romance, innate and acquired. It stood me, many a time, in the stead of better things, when nerving myself to endure affliction and wrong; and therefore I notice it, to warn you against exposing your own children to the same snare.