As for black Domingue, you think he was a capital old fellow; and you
think more of him and his bananas than you do of the bursting, throbbing
heart of poor Paul. As yet Dream-life does not take hold on love. A
little maturity of heart is wanted to make up what the poets call
sensibility. If love should come to be a dangerous, chivalric matter, as
in the case of Helen Mar and Wallace, you can very easily conceive of
it, and can take hold of all the little accessories of male costume and
embroidering of banners; but as for pure sentiment, such as lies in the
sweet story of Bernardin de St. Pierre, it is quite beyond you.
The rich, soft nights, in which one might doze in his hammock, watching
the play of the silvery moonbeams upon the orange-leaves and upon the
waves, you can understand; and you fall to dreaming of that lovely Isle
of France, and wondering if Virginia did not perhaps have some relations
on the island, who raise pine-apples, and such sort of things, still?
----And so with your head upon your hand in your quiet garret-corner,
over some such beguiling story, your thought leans away from the book
into your own dreamy cruise over the sea of life.
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