The raptures of lovers are not to be described; and if the pen of the ready-writer may gain inspiration to delineate the workings of strong mental passions, of intense moral or physical excitements, to depict stormy wrath, the agonies of hope deferred, the slow-consuming pangs of hopeless regret, there is one thing that must ever defy his powers of representation—the calm enjoyment of every-day domestic happiness; the easy and unvarying pleasures of contentment; the placid routine of hourly duties, hourly delights, hourly labors, hourly affections; and that soft intermixture of small cares and passing sorrows, with great blessings tasted, and great gratitudes due, which make up the sum of the most innocent and blessed human life.
And such was the life of Sir Aradas and the fair Guendolen de Ratcliffe, until, to borrow the quaint phrase of the narrator of those incomparable tales of the Thousand and One Nights, "they were visited by the terminator of delights, and the separator of companions. Extolled be the perfection of the Living, who dieth not!"
Sir Yvo de Taillebois lived long enough to see his child's children gathered to his knee; to prognosticate, in their promise, fresh honors to his high-born race; but not so long as to outlive his intellect, his powers to advise, console, enjoy, and, above all, to trust in God. Full of years and full of honors, he was gathered to his fathers in the ripeness of his time, and he sleeps in a quiet churchyard in his native valley, where a green oak-tree shades his ashes, and the ever-vocal music of the rippling Kent sings his sweet, natural requiem.
Eadwulf the Red never recovered from the starvation and exposure endured in his escape and subsequent wanderings; and, though he received the priceless boon of liberty, and the king's free pardon for his crimes, though he passed his declining days in the beautiful cottage nigh Kentmere, with his noble brother, his fair wife, and all the treasured little ones about him, who grew up like olive-branches round Kenric's happy, honored board, with every thing to soothe his stubborn heart and soften his morose and bitter spirit, he lived and died a gloomy, disappointed, bitter, and bad-hearted man, a victim in some sort of the vicious and cruel system which had debased his soul more even than it had degraded his body.
Yet it was not in that accursed system, altogether; for the gallant and good Kenric, and his sweet wife, Edith the Fair, were living proofs, even, as the noble poet sings—
"That gentleness and love and trust
Prevail o'er angry wave and gust;"
and it was no less "the spur, that the clear spirit doth raise," than the grand force of that holiest Saxon institution, Trial by Jury, that raised Kenric from a Saxon serf to be an English freeman.
Transcriber's Note:
Minor typographical errors have been corrected without note.