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manner as to be able to manage it at pleasure ? You would play with it, 
but it will sting and torment you cruelly; and do you know that every one 
will mock and deride you for attempting to charm or tie down love, and on 
a false assurance to put into your bosom a dangerous serpent, which has 
spoiled and destroyed both your soul and your honor ? 
“Good God! what blindness is this, to play away thus at hazard, 
against such frivolous stakes, the principal power of our soul! Yes, my 
reader, for God regards not man, but for his soul; nor his soul, but for his 
will; nor his will, but for his love. 
“Alas ! we have not near so much love as we stand in need of: I mean 
to say that we fall infinitely short of having sufficient wherewith to love 
God and yet, wretches as we are, we lavish it away foolishly on vain and 
frivolous things, as if we had some to spare. Ah ! this great God, who has 
reserved to Himself the whole love of our souls, in acknowledgment of our 
creation, preservation, and redemption, will exact a strict account of all 
these criminal deductions we make from it, for if He will make so rigorous 
an examination into our idle words, how strictly will He not examine into 
our impertinent, foolish, and pernicious loves T 
Oh! there are some 
Can trifle, in cold vanity, with all 
The warn soul’s precious throbs; 
To whom it is 
A triumph, that a fond, devoted heart 
Is breaking for them, w T ho can bear to call 
Young flowers into beauty, and then crush them. 
— L. A. Landon. 
