re whether we attempt to describe the
passion at twenty, at thirty, or at eighty years. He who paints it at
the first period will lose some of its later, he who paints it at
the last, some of its earlier traits. Only it is to be hoped that by
patience and the Muses' aid we may attain to that inward view of the law
which shall describe a truth ever young and beautiful, so central that
it shall commend itself to the eye, at whatever angle beholden.

And the first condition is, that we must leave a too close and lingering
adherence to facts, and study the sentiment as it appeared in hope and
not in history. For each man sees his own life defaced and disfigured,
as the life of man is not, to his imagination. Each man sees over his
own experience a certain stain of error, whilst that of other men looks
fair and ideal. Let any man go back to those delicious relations which
make the beauty of his life, which have given him sincerest instruction
and nourishment, he will shrink and moan. Alas! I know not why, but
infinite compunctions embitter in mature life the remembrances of
budding joy and cover every beloved name. Every thing is beautiful seen
from the point of the intellect, or as truth. But all is sour, if seen
as experience. Details are melancholy; the plan is seemly and noble. In
the actual world--the painful kingdom of time and place--dwell care, and
canker, and fear. With thought, with the ideal, is immortal hilarity,
the rose of joy. Round it all the Muses sing. But grief cleaves to
names, and persons, and the partial interests of to-day and yesterday.

The strong bent of nature is seen in the proportion which this topic
of personal relations usurps in the conversation of society. What do
we wish to know of any worthy person so much, as how he has sped in
the history of this sentiment? What books in the circulating libraries
circulate? How we glow over these novels of passion, when the story is
told with any spark of truth and nature! And what fastens attention, in
the intercourse of life, like any passage betraying affection between
two parties? Perhaps we never saw them before, and never shall meet them
again. But we see them exchange a glance, or betray a deep emotion, and
we are no longer strangers. We understand them, and take the warmest
interest in the development of the romance. All mankind love a lover.
The earliest demonstrations of complacency and kindness are nature's
most winning pictures. It is the dawn