Among the blessings of providence, there is none which exceeds the rich love of a sister. He who has been blessed with such, whether he knows it or not, has ever had near him a fountain of sweet thoughts and gentle sympathies, that could have made the darkest day cheerful. Especially has he been blessed, if circumstances have contrived to break him from all other ties of consanguinity, and in joys and sorrows he has witnessed the development of those beautiful principles which enter so largely into the composition of her character, for the development of those principles must have been attended by such love and considerateness on her part, as only served to make them more beautiful, and bring them nearer the attributes of angels.
A sister’s love is disinterested, and therefore invaluable. No one has ever doubted but that the female heart generally is richer in feelings than a man’s; that among our sweetest consolations when earthly ties are sundered, and ‘thick coming fancies’ crowd in upon the brain till it is black with sadness, are placed those alleviations which her tenderness and her solicitude can offer. But yet the love of another than a sister, from the very grounds of such preference and its means of perpetuity, cannot be other than a selfish and mixed passion. It is far more the result of circumstances; these have power to modify it, and they are eternally changing. With a sister there is nothing of this; with her it is the involuntary promptings of nature, and to call such a selfish or mixed passion, is to call truth falsehood. There is no chilling calculation, no selfish wish for a reciprocate sympathy, and a latent purpose within to be ruled by this in the degree of her own affection. She never thinks to ask if there is a chance of the better feelings of her heart’s running to waste; nor can she lean to the side of an overweening prudence, and coolly measure out her love in just proportion to the worth of him to whom she gives it. No! she can do none of these;—on the contrary, the most eminent instances of her warmest devotion are found, where the recipients of it were the least worthy. Cases innumerous might be cited, in which, against difficulties to daunt other than her, her love has seemed to grow purer and more enduring, even as a green and luxuriant vine seems to take newer beauty, as it clambers about a scathed oak or melancholy ruin.
A sister’s love is pure, and therefore invaluable. No truth is more obvious than this, that those who have been favored with the sweet sympathies and affections of a sister, and educated in that unrestrained intercourse so favorable to the development of domestic virtue, possess a softness of character and purity of feeling, to which other men are strangers. I know it has been objected to this, that such a character is effeminate, and altogether unfitted for the sphere to which men are called. Now were the charge of effeminacy admitted, we have yet to learn that true fortitude is not equally the property of gentle as well as rugged natures, and that the manifestation of it in one person more than another, is not traceable altogether to other and opposite causes. But we do not admit it; the characteristic above referred to is not effeminate; it is too sacred not to be a treasure, and it is too beautiful to be an error. It is a spirit like His who stood upon the waves, passing over and stilling the angry waters of human passion; a breath of spring sent upon the world calling the moss and ivy to their high dwellings, and scattering the flowers upon the slopes and in the vallies; a beam of sunshine thrown down from a summer sky, casting into shade the roughness of the landscape, and softening all into beauty. A character matured under the circumstances referred to, need lose nothing of its firmness by the process. On the contrary, the native energies of the mind may expand with greater freedom (for many of those things which usually retard it are removed) and it can ruffle its wings with a wider sweep, and stoop for the quarry with a nobler vision. As for the charge, that our capacities for misery are increased in an increased ratio by that refinement of feeling which is induced by feminine intercourse, we hardly think it worth the refutation. The fact that that French fool, Rousseau, could start a question which involves this, has not succeeded in raising it above contempt; and we shall quit the subject therefore with the simple statement of our own belief, viz.—that Heaven never endowed man with any superfluous faculties, that at every successive stage of moral and mental culture there is more than a proportionate increase of positive happiness, and that it is only when every power of the mind is in requisition and each taxed to its extreme capacity, that the mind approaches its perfection.
A sister’s love is eternal, and therefore invaluable. Much ink has been wasted on the subject, of the power of female affection—for which subject we have the current phrases of ‘dying for love,’ ‘broken hearts,’ ‘Cupid’s achievements,’ and other such classical appellatives. Poets have worn the matter thread-bare, and novelists have picked up the shreds to patch garments for their heroes. One gentleman less scrupulous than another, has dared raise a doubt of the matter, somewhat withholding from the ladies the exclusive privilege of dying thus heroically; another conceiving this a challenge to his gallantry, has most manfully seized the crab-stick and fallen to work pell-mell on the other side. Now amid such a clash of fire arms as this we suppose it behoves us to walk circumspectly, and somewhat question whether the fair bevy of our acquaintance would not cry us heretic, did we call in question this same right, viz., of dying for this or that thing just as suits them without asking leave of judge or jury. But the truth of it is we have a belief on the matter, and sorry are we to say that for lack of something better we feel called upon to divulge it, deprecating however from our souls every intention of making any unpleasant expositions, and professing a love for the truth and nothing but the truth. To begin then;—we boldly make the remark, that many a woman has gone to her grave from ill-requited affection. The man who denies this, has either never mingled in society, or has kept his eyes shut while there, or is a fool. But—and here is the rub—whether the passion which resulted in the breaking of this or that heart was an unmixed one, a thing which of itself destroyed the heart, this I say ‘puzzles the will,’ and is a sad problem for solution. We make the following remarks: any one who looks closely at society, and looks at the little springs which operate on this side and on that to keep the whole machinery in operation, will be wonderfully struck with the great discrepancy betwixt real truths and those admitted as such by the world. He will see that to trace an act to its cause, to find that principle and trace it into generalities, is to frighten him at the artificiality of society and the extreme ignorance of the human race. Effects which he had been accustomed to assign to certain causes as things of course, he finds are traceable altogether to other causes. The strangest phenomena does he meet with; causes producing effects as opposite to their apparent tendencies as possible; causes misnamed effects; effects taken for causes; in short, terms misapplied and jumbled together with most admirable confusion. Now to apply these remarks, we beg leave to add—that men may have made a mistake in reference to the subject in question. For ourselves we have known a case of misplaced affection—a lovely girl, fair as the first star that peeps through the net-work of twilight, and gentle as the bonniest May flower of the season. And yet she died; and when the first burst of a generous indignation had passed off and space was given for reflection, for the life of us we could not make other conclusion, than that the pity of the world and her extreme susceptibility to ridicule were enough of themselves to destroy her. The truth of it is, it is one of the subtlest passions of our nature, yet not the most powerful; and though it gain the same end, first subjecting the other powers to itself and thus breaking down the spirit, it does this rather by its extreme cunning than by any energies of its own. But a sister’s deep faith, what alloy find we here! what sentiment that the pure heart might not offer at the throne of God! This is that star which brightens and brightens as it comes up from the horizon and pours its undimmed beauty upon the world! It is one of those flowers that sometimes spring up by the path-way of life to tell us how bright was the primitive world, and give us a glimpse of the brightness and profusion of the one to come! And the eye brightens, the heart expands, and the soul bounds exultant on its heavenward mission as we gaze upon it, till the veil seems rent in twain, and we think and see and feel our certain immortality!
A circumstance fell under my observation not many years since in a part of the state of New York, with which I shall close these remarks—indeed, it forms not an inappropriate conclusion. It made a great impression on me at the time, and the reader perhaps will thank me for rescuing from oblivion one of those touching incidents in real life which sometimes occur, and cast into shadow the wildest dreams of fiction.
Any one who has visited the little town of P—— in Ulster County, remembers well enough that there’s no way of entering it from the west, save through a long defile cut as it would seem by art through the heart of a mountain, and he also remembers what a scene of beauty is presented as he emerges from the pass and sends his gaze before him. A common of about half a mile square, surrounded by neat and in some instances very elegant dwellings, in the center of which with its neat bow windows and little spire, is the only church of the village. The village has an air of life and business; a stream tumbles off from the hills on the north supplying a large factory on the lower grounds, and from the more elevated parts may the eye catch the bends of the lordly Hudson in the distance, and in clear still mornings may the ‘yo-heave-yo’ of sailors or the clatter of steam boats be faintly heard, as they pass and repass on the river.
It was into this little village that I jogged with a quiet pace one warm afternoon, and began to look around for an inn. It was the heat of summer, and for no less than forty good English miles had myself and horse stumped it since morning, and over as dusty a road withall as one would like to travel on; and my horse seeming to feel his necessities as well as myself began to move a little faster, and by a sort of instinct, point his ears straight towards a large sign board swinging directly over the road, on which was a rampant lion large as life his fiery tongue lolling part way from his mouth, and a sort of dare-devil threat in his eye that he was about to leap down on the passengers. This however was yet a good half a mile off; and as I passed along, the village church-yard lay upon the left. I had come nearly to the end of this, when a light form sprang over the wall, and running up to me seized my horse by the bridle, while it said—
“O, sir, do come—they’ve left him all alone there, and I’ve called to him and sung to him, and he wont hear me—do come, sir, won’t you?”—and it pulled gently by the bit as it spake, and my horse stopped.
I was thunder-struck. The creature before me was a faded girl, and as I should think in the last stages of the consumption. She must have been exceedingly beautiful once, for her form was still symmetry itself, and her features were as regular as if shaped with a chisel. Her face however was very pale. The blue veins were traceable on a forehead of silver by the ridges they made, though almost as white as the skin about them. Her eye-brows were regular as if struck out with a compass, and beneath them her eyes large, dark, and full, flashed as bright and as wild as stars in a wintry night. Her lip was as thin as paper. Her dress lay loose and low, and surely no lovelier neck and bosom (though they were shrunken) ever came into a poet’s vision, than that which rose and sank there painfully rapid as she stood waiting my answer. The hand which still lay on my bridle-bit was so thin and attenuated, that actually the sun shone through it almost as easily as if it were a piece of glass; and her small feet and ankles which were without covering, gave equal evidence of sorrow and abandonment. The only thing about her which still retained all its former beauty, was her hair, long, dark, and silky—that ornament of woman which death cannot destroy—which she still possessed, and in thick masses of luxuriant brown it hung about her with all the grace of a Madonna.
I know not but nature has given me an undue quantum of sensibility, but I was melted to tears by this poor creature before me. I have described her features—these the reader will see; but the whole expression, the thing which cannot be conveyed to paper, that must be imagined. Its wo, its extreme wo; the circumstances too, so near a populous village, and yet alone; the church yard at hand, and the few incoherent words dropped from her lips; these at first came over me with a sort of sickening fear, and I trembled lest the figure before me should, like the witches that met Macbeth on the heath, ‘change into the air.’