Few die of a _broken heart_, and these few (the surgeons tell us) know nothing of it, and, dying suddenly, leave to the dissector the first discovery. O this is but the shallow remark of a hard and unthinking prosperity! Have you never seen a stick broken in the middle, and yet cohering by the rind? The fibres, half of them actually broken and the rest sprained and, though tough, unsustaining? O many, many are the broken-hearted for those who know what the moral and practical heart of the man is!
[Sidenote: VOX HIEMALIS Thursday, Sept. 30, 1824]
Now the breeze through the stiff and brittle-becoming foliage of the trees counterfeits the sound of a rushing stream or water-flood suddenly sweeping by. The sigh, the modulated continuousness of the murmur is exchanged for the confusion of overtaking sounds--the self-evolution of the One, for the clash or stroke of ever-commencing contact of the multitudinous, without interspace, by confusion. The short gusts rustle and the ear feels the unlithesome dryness, before the eye detects the coarser, duller, though deeper green, deadened and not [yet] awakened into the hues of decay--echoes of spring from the sepulchral vault of winter. The aged year, conversant with the forms of its youth and forgetting all the intervals, feebly reproduces them [as it were, from], memory.
[Sidenote: CONSTANCY Friday, June 9, 1826]
"Constancy lives in realms above." This exclusion of constancy from the list of earthly virtues may be a poet's exaggeration, but, certainly, it is of far rarer occurrence in _all_ relations of life than the young and warm-hearted are willing to believe, but in cases of _exclusive_ attachment (that is, in Love, properly so-called, and yet distinct from Friendship), and in the _highest_ form of the Virtue, it is _so_ rare that I cannot help doubting whether an instance of _mutual_ constancy in effect ever existed. For there are two sorts of constancy, the one negative, where there is no _transfer_ of affection, where the bond of attachment is not broken though it may be attenuated to a thread--this may be met with, not so seldom, and, where there is goodness of heart, it may be expected--but the other sort, or _positive_ constancy, where the affection endures in the same intensity with the same or increased tenderness and _nearness_, of this it is that I doubt whether once in an age an instance occurs where _A_ feels it toward _B_, and _B_ feels it towards _A_, and _vice versâ_.