Look for her, after a little
while, and you find friendship weeping over her untimely grave,
and wondering that one, who but lately glowed with all the
radiance of health and beauty, should so speedily be brought down
to "darkness and the worm." You will be told of some wintry
chill, some casual indisposition, that laid her low;--but no one
knows of the mental malady which previously sapped her strength,
and made her so easy a prey to the spoiler.
She is like some tender tree, the pride and beauty of the grove;
graceful in its form, bright in its foliage, but with the worm
preying at its heart. We find it suddenly withering, when it
should be most fresh and luxuriant. We see it drooping its
branches to the earth, and shedding leaf by leaf, until, wasted
and perished away, it falls even in the stillness of the forest;
and as we muse over the beautiful ruin, we strive in vain to
recollect the blast or thunderbolt that could have smitten it
with decay.
I have seen many instances of women running to waste and
self-neglect, and disappearing gradually from the earth, almost
as if they had been exhaled to heaven; and have repeatedly
fancied that I could trace their deaths through the various
declensions of consumption, cold, debility, languor, melancholy,
until I reached the first symptom of disappointed love.
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