Memoirs of an editor : fifty years of American journalism / Edward P. Mitchell.

A NEW ENGLAND EDUCATION

5

ing upon the senses, but imperceptible to the understanding.
When anxieties have been excited by involved and doubtful
events, they are afterwards elucidated by the consequences.
The scenes of "Alonzo and Melissa" were laid in New
London and in some unidentified region of western Connecticut near the Sound. I wish I might mention a few
of the involved and doubtful events afterward elucidated
by the consequences, but must content myself with one
passage from the remarks wherewith Doctor Franklin,
in philosophic converse with Alonzo, then a Revolutionary prisoner escaped from London to Paris, offered consolation for the supposed death of the beauteous Melissa
in America:
"Was it the splendours of beauty which enraptured you?
Sickness may and age must destroy the symmetry of the most
finished form-the brilliancy of the finest features. Was it the
graces of the mind? I tell you that by familiarity these allurements are lost, and the mind left vacant turns to some other
source to supply vacuum. Besides, the attainment of your wishes
might have been the death of your hopes. If my reasoning is
correct, the ardency of your passion might have closed with
the pursuit. An every day suit, however rich and costly the
texture, is soon worn threadbare. On your part, indifference
would consequently succeed; on the part of your partner, disappointment, jealousy and disgust. What might follow is* needless for me to name; your soul must shudder at the idea of
conjugal infidelity.... After all, my young friend, it will be
well for you to consider, whether the all-wise dispensing hand
of Providence has not directed this matter, which you esteem
so great an affliction, for your greatest good and most essential
advantage. And suffer me to tell you, that in all my observations on life, I have always found that those connections which
were formed from inordinate passion, or what some would call

pure affection, have been ever the most unhappy. Beware,
then, my son, beware of yielding the heart to the effeminacies
of passion. Exquisite sensibilities are ever subject to exquisite
inquietudes."
Franklin paused. His reasonings, however they convinced