ABSENCE

ABSENCE.

'T is ever common, that men are merriest when they are from home.—Shakespeare.

Distance of time and place do generally cure what they seem to aggravate; and taking leave of our friends resembles taking leave of the world, concerning which it hath been often said that it is not death, but dying, which is terrible. Fielding.

The joy of meeting pays the pangs of ab- tence; else who could bear it ?—Rowe.

All flowers will droop in absence of the sun that waked their sweets.—Dryden.

What vigor absence adds to love!—Flatman.

I am not sure if the ladies understand the full value of the influence of absence, nor do I think it wise to teach it them, lest, like the Cle- lias and Mandanes of yore, they should resume the humor of sending their lovers into banishment. Distance, in truth, produces in idea the same effect as in real perspective. Objects are softened, and rounded, and rendered doubly graceful; the harsher and more ordinary points of character are mellowed down, and those by which it is remembered are the more striking outlines that mark sublimity, grace, or beauty. Walter Scott.

Absent in body, but present in spirit.—Bible.

Absence diminishes moderate passions and augments great ones, as the wind extinguishes candles and kindles the fire.—Rochefoucauld.

The absent are never without fault, nor the present without excuse.—Franklin.

Absence, like death, sets a seal on the image of those we have loved; we cannot realize the intervening changes which time may have effected.—Goldsmith.

Oar souls much farther than our eyes can see.—Michael Drayton.

I find the attraction of love is in an inverse proportion to the attraction of the Newtonian philosophy. Every mile-stone that marked my progress from Clarinda awakened a keener pang of attachment.—Burns.

Love reckons hours for months, and days for years; and every little absence is an age.—

Dryden.

Distance sometimes endears friendship, and absence sweeteneth it.—Howell.

Give me to drink mandragora, that I might sleep out this great gap of time my Antony it away.—Shakespeare.

What! keep a week away * Seven days and nights? eightscore eight hours? and lovers' absent hours, more tedious than the dial eight- score dines ? O weary reckoning!—Shakespeare.

The presence of those whom we love is as a double life; absence, in its anxious longing and sense of vacancy, is as a foretaste of death.—

Mrs. Jameson.