I often wander, in the calm summer evenings, to the quiet churchyard, and return a sadder, but, I hope, a better man, after meditating upon the troublous and adventurous life, and peaceful and Christian death of the ROTHESAY FISHERMAN.
LEAVES FROM THE DIARY OF AN AGED SPINSTER.
The poet of THE ELEGY _par excellence_, hath written two lines, which run thus--
"Full many a flower is born to blush unseen, And waste its sweetness on the desert air."
Now, I never can think of these lines but they remind me of the tender, delicate, living, breathing, and neglected flowers that bud, blossom, shed their leaves, and die, in cold unsunned obscurity--flowers that were formed to shed their fragrance around a man's heart, and to charm his eye--but which, though wandering melancholy and alone in the wilderness where they grow, he passeth by with neglect, making a companion of his loneliness. But, to drop all metaphor--where will you find a flower more interesting than a spinster of threescore and ten, of sixty, of fifty, or of forty? They have, indeed, "wasted their sweetness on the desert air." Some call them "old maids;" but it is a malicious appellation, unless it can be proved that they have refused to be wives. I would always take the part of a spinster; they are a peculiar people, far more "sinned against than sinning." Every blockhead thinks himself at liberty to crack a joke upon them; and when he says something, that he conceives to be wondrous smart, about Miss Such-an-One and her cat or poodle dog, he conceives himself a marvellous clever fellow; yea, even those of her own sex who are below what is called a "certain age" (what that age is, I cannot tell), think themselves privileged to giggle at the expense of their elder sister. Now, though there may be a degree of peevishness (and it is not to be wondered at) amongst the sisterhood, yet with them you will find the most sensitive tenderness of heart, a delicacy that quivers, like the aspen leaf, at a breath, and a kindliness of soul that a mother might envy--or rather, for envy, shall I not write _imitate_? But ah! if their history were told, what a chronicle would it exhibit of blighted affections, withered hearts, secret tears, and midnight sighs!