“Elinor returned to the residence of her mother’s family in the hope of
renewing former images, but she found only the words that had conveyed
those ideas, and she looked around in vain for the impressions they had
once suggested. When we thus come to feel that _all_ has been illusion,
even on the most solemn subjects,--that the future world seems to be
deserting us along with the present, and that our own hearts, with all
their treachery, have done us no more wrong than the false impressions
which we have received from our religious instructors, we are like the
deity in the painting of the great Italian artist, extending one hand to
the sun, and the other to the moon, but touching neither. Elinor had
imagined or hoped, that the language of her aunt would have revived her
habitual associations--she was disappointed. It is true no pains were
spared--when Elinor wished to read, she was furnished amply with the
Westminster Confession, or Prynne’s Histriomastrix; or if she wished for
lighter pages, for the Belles Lettres of Puritanism, there were John
Bunyan’s Holy War, or the life of Mr Badman. If she closed the book in
despair at the insensibility of her untouched heart, she was invited to
a godly conference, where the non-conformist ministers, who had been, in
the language of the day, extinguished under the Bartholomew bushel(8),
met to give the precious word in season to the scattered fold of the
Lord. Elinor knelt and wept too at these meetings; but, while her form
was prostrated before the Deity, her tears fell for one whom she dared
not name. When, in incontroulable agony, she sought, like Joseph, where
she might weep unobserved and unrestrained, and rushed into the narrow
garden that skirted the cottage of her aunt, and wept there, she was
followed by the quiet, sedate figure, moving at the rate of an inch in a
minute, who offered her for her consolation, the newly published and
difficultly obtained work of Marshall on Sanctification. (8) Anachronism--n’importe. “Elinor, accustomed too much to that fatal excitement of the heart,
which renders all other excitement as faint and feeble as the air of
heaven to one who has been inhaling the potent inebriation of the
strongest perfumes, wondered how this being, so abstracted, cold, and
unearthly, could tolerate her motionless existence. She rose at a fixed
hour,--at a fixed hour she prayed,--at a fixed hour received the godly
friends who visited her, and whose existence was as monotonous and
apathetic as her own,--at a fixed hour she dined,--and at a fixed hour
she prayed again, and then retired,--yet she prayed without unction, and
fed without appetite, and retired to rest without the least inclination
to sleep. Her life was mere mechanism, but the machine was so well wound
up, that it appeared to have some quiet consciousness and sullen
satisfaction in its movements. “Elinor struggled in vain for the renewal of this life of cold
mediocrity,--she thirsted for it as one who, in the deserts of Afric,
expiring for want of water, would wish for the moment to be an inmate of
Lapland, to drink of their eternal snows,--yet at that moment wonders
how its inhabitants can live among SNOW. She saw a being far inferior to
herself in mental power,--of feelings that hardly deserved the
name--_tranquil_, and wondered that she herself was wretched.--Alas! she
did not know, that the heartless and unimaginative are those alone who
entitle themselves to the comforts of life, and who can alone enjoy
them. A cold and sluggish mediocrity in their occupations or their
amusements, is all they require--pleasure has with them no meaning but
the exemption from actual suffering, nor do they annex any idea to pain
but the immediate infliction of corporeal suffering, or of external
calamity--the source of pain or pleasure is never found in their
_hearts_--while those who have profound feelings scarce ever look
elsewhere for either. So much the worse for them,--the being reduced to
providing for the necessities of human life, and being satisfied when
that provision is made, is perhaps the best condition of human
life--beyond that, all is the dream of insanity, or the agony of
disappointment. Far better the dull and dusky winter’s day, whose gloom,
if it never abates, never increases,--(and to which we lift up an eye of
listlessness, in which there is no apprehension of future and added
terrors),--to the glorious fierceness of the summer’s day, whose sun
sets amid purple and gold,--while, panting under its parting beams, we
see the clouds collecting in the darkening East, and view the armies of
heaven on their march, whose thunders are to break our rest, and whose
lightnings may crumble us to ashes. * * * * *

“Elinor strove hard with her fate,--the strength of her intellect had
been much developed since her residence at Mortimer Castle, and there
also the energies of her heart had been developed fatally. How dreadful
is the conflict of superior intellect and a burning heart, with the
perfect mediocrity of the characters and circumstances they are
generally doomed to live with! The battering-rams play against
wool-bags,--the lightnings glance on ice, hiss, and are extinguished. The greater strength we exhibit, we feel we are more and more paralyzed
by the weakness of our enemies,--our very energy becomes our bitterest
enemy, as it fights in vain against the impregnable fortress of total
vacuity! It is in vain we assail a foe who neither knows our language or
uses our weapons. Elinor gave it up,--yet still she struggled with her
own feelings; and perhaps the conflict which she now undertook was the
hardest of all. She had received her first religious impressions under
the roof of her Puritanic aunt, and, true or false, they had been so
vivid, that she was anxious to revive them. When the heart is robbed of
its first-born, there is nothing it will not try to adopt. Elinor
remembered a very affecting scene that had occurred in her childhood,
beneath the roof where she now resided. “An old non-conformist minister, a very Saint John for sanctity of life,
and simplicity of manners, had been seized by a magistrate while giving
the word of consolation to a few of his flock who had met at the cottage
of her aunt. “The old man had supplicated for a moment’s delay on the part of the
civil power, and its officers, by an unusual effort of toleration or of
humanity, complied. Turning to his congregation, who, amid the tumult of
the arrest, had never risen from their knees, and only changed the voice
of supplication from praying with their pastor, to praying for him,--he
quoted to them that beautiful passage from the prophet Malachi, which
appears to give such delightful encouragement to the spiritual
intercourse of Christians,--“Then they that feared the Lord, spoke often
to one another, and the Lord heard it,” &c. As he spoke, the old man was
dragged away by some rougher hands, and died soon after in confinement.