The affection for a mother, whose kindness you recall with a suffused
eye, is not gone, or blighted; but it is woven up, as only a single
adorning tissue, into the growing pride of youth: it is cherished in the
proud soul rather as a redeeming weakness than as a vital energy.
And the love for Nelly, though it bates no jot of fervor, is woven into
the scale of growing purposes rather as a color to adorn than as a
strand to strengthen.
As for your other loves, those romantic ones which were kindled by
bright eyes, and the stolen reading of Miss Porter's novels, they linger
on your mind like perfumes; and they float down your memory--with the
figure, the step, the last words of those young girls who raised
them--like the types of some dimly shadowed but deeper passion, which is
some time to spur your maturer purposes and to quicken your manly
resolves.
It would be hard to tell, for you do not as yet know, but that Madge
herself--hoidenish, blue-eyed Madge--is to be the very one who will gain
such hold upon your riper affections as she has held already over your
boyish caprice. It is a part of the pride--I may say rather an evidence
of the pride--which youth feels in leaving boyhood behind him, to talk
laughingly and carelessly of those attachments which made his young
years so balmy with dreams.
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