It is
measuring the ideal by too practical a standard. It sweeps away all the
delightful vagueness of a fairy dream of love, and reduces one to a dull
and economic estimate of actual qualities. Passion lives above all
analysis and estimate, and arrives at its conclusions by intuition.
Did Petrarch ever think if Laura would make a good wife; did Oswald ever
think it of Corinne? Nay, did even the more practical Waverley ever
think it of the impassioned Flora? Would it not weaken faith in their
romantic passages, if you believed it? What have such vulgar, practical
issues to do with that passion which sublimates the faculties, and makes
the loving dreamer to live in an ideal sphere where nothing but goodness
and brightness can come?
Nelly is to be pitied for entertaining such a thought; and yet Nelly is
very good and kind. Her affections are without doubt all centred in the
remnant of the shattered home; she has never known any further and
deeper love; never once fancied it even--
--Ah, Clarence, you are very young!
And yet there are some things that puzzle you in Nelly. You have found
accidentally, in one of her treasured books,--a book that lies almost
always on her dressing-table,--a little withered flower with its stem in
a slip of paper, and on the paper the initials of--your old friend
Frank.
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