Another compliment, true and genuine, was paid by a sailor, who was sent by his captain to carry a letter to the lady of his love. The sailor, having delivered his missive, stood gazing in silent admiration upon the face of the lady, for she was very beautiful.
“Well, my good man, for what do you wait? There is no answer to be returned.”
“Lady,” the sailor replied, with becoming deference, “I would like to know your name.”
“Did you not see it on the letter?”
“Pardon, lady, I never learned to read. Mine has been a hard, rough life.”
“And for what reason, my good man, would you like to know my name?”
“Because,” answered the old tar, looking honestly up, “in a storm at sea, with danger or death before me, I would like to call the name of the brightest thing I’d ever seen in my life. There’d be sunshine in it, even in the thick darkness.”
Tom Hood wrote to his wife: “I never was anything till I knew you—and I have been better, happier, and a more prosperous man ever since. Lay that truth by in lavender, and remind me of it when I fail. I am writing fondly and warmly; but not without good cause. First, your own affectionate letter, lately received; next, the remembrance of our dear children, pledges of our dear old familiar love; then a delicious impulse to pour out the overflowing of my heart into yours; and last, not least, the knowledge that your dear eyes will read what my hands are now writing. Perhaps there is an afterthought that, whatever may befall me, the wife of my bosom will have this acknowledgment of her tenderness, worth, and excellence, of all that is wifely or womanly, from my pen.”
Samuel Rogers once told Dean Stanley that when he was a boy he remembered being present at Sir Joshua Reynolds’s last lecture, and at the end of the lecture he saw Mr. Burke go up to Sir Joshua, and on that solemn occasion quote the lines from “Paradise Lost”:—
“The angel ended, and in Adam’s ear