On reading over the foregoing letter, I was much struck by the tone of melancholy that pervaded it; and well knowing it to be the habit of the writer’s mind to seek relief, when under the pressure of any disquiet or disgust, in that sense of freedom which told him that there were homes for him elsewhere, I could perceive, I thought, in his recollections of the “blue Olympus,” some return of the restless and roving spirit, which unhappiness or impatience always called up in his mind.  I had, indeed, at the time when he sent me those melancholy verses, “There’s not a joy this world can give,” &c. felt some vague apprehensions as to the mood into which his spirits then seemed to be sinking, and, in acknowledging the receipt of the verses, thus tried to banter him out of it:—­“But why thus on your stool of melancholy again, Master Stephen?—­This will never do—­it plays the deuce with all the matter-of-fact duties of life, and you must bid adieu to it.  Youth is the only time when one can be melancholy with impunity.  As life itself grows sad and serious we have nothing for it but—­to be as much as possible the contrary.”

My absence from London during the whole of this year had deprived me of all opportunities of judging for myself how far the appearances of his domestic state gave promise of happiness; nor had any rumours reached me which at all inclined me to suspect that the course of his married life hitherto exhibited less smoothness than such unions,—­on the surface, at least,—­generally wear.  The strong and affectionate terms in which, soon after the marriage, he had, in some of the letters I have given, declared his own happiness—­a declaration which his known frankness left me no room to question—­had, in no small degree, tended to still those apprehensions which my first view of the lot he had chosen for himself awakened.  I could not, however, but observe that these indications of a contented heart soon ceased.  His mention of the partner of his home became more rare and formal, and there was observable, I thought, through some of his letters a feeling of unquiet and weariness that brought back all those gloomy anticipations with which I had, from the first, regarded his fate.  This last letter of his, in particular, struck me as full of sad omen, and, in the course of my answer, I thus noticed to him the impression it had made on me:—­“And so you are a whole year married!—­

    ’It was last year I vow’d to thee
    That fond impossibility.’

Do you know, my dear B., there was a something in your last letter—­a sort of unquiet mystery, as well as a want of your usual elasticity of spirits—­which has hung upon my mind unpleasantly ever since.  I long to be near you, that I might know how you really look and feel; for these letters tell nothing, and one word, a quattr’occhi, is worth whole reams of correspondence.  But only do tell me you are happier than that letter has led me to fear, and I shall be satisfied.”