But this
fresh dream, odorous with its memories of sleigh-rides or
lilac-blossoms, slips by, and yields again to the more ambitious dreams
of the cloister.
In the prouder moments that come when you are more a man and less a
boy,--with more of strategy and less of faith,--your thought of woman
runs loftily; not loftily in the realm of virtue or goodness, but
loftily on your new world-scale. The pride of intellect, that is
thirsting in you, fashions ideal graces after a classic model. The
heroines of fable are admired; and the soul is tortured with that
intensity of passion which gleams through the broken utterances of
Grecian tragedy.
In the vanity of self-consciousness one feels at a long remove above the
ordinary love and trustfulness of a simple and pure heart. You turn away
from all such with a sigh of conceit, to graze on that lofty but bitter
pasturage where no daisies grow. Admiration may be called up by some
graceful figure that you see moving under those sweeping elms; and you
follow it with an intensity of look that makes you blush, and
straightway hide the memory of the blush by summing up some artful
sophistry, that resolves your delighted gaze into a weakness, and your
contempt into a virtue.
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