to be admired by all
and feared by none. In the general opinion he was a downright good
fellow and amazingly clever.

VII

In youth, as at the opera, everything seems possible. Surely it is not
necessary to choose between love and riches. One may have both, and
the one all the more easily for having attained the other. It must be a
fiction of the moralists who construct the dramas that the god of love
and the god of money each claims an undivided allegiance. It was in
some wholly legendary, perhaps spiritual, world that it was necessary to
renounce love to gain the Rhine gold. The boxes at the Metropolitan did
not believe this. The spectators of the boxes could believe it still
less. For was not beauty there seen shining in jewels that have a market
value, and did not love visibly preside over the union, and make it
known that his sweetest favors go with a prosperous world? And yet, is
the charm of life somewhat depending upon a sense of its fleetingness,
of its phantasmagorial character, a note of coming disaster, maybe, in
the midst of its most seductive pageantry, in the whirl and glitter and
hurry of it? Is there some subtle sense of exquisite satisfaction in
snatching the sweet moments of life out of the very delirium of it, that
must soon end in an awakening to bankruptcy of the affections, and the
dreadful loss of illusions? Else why do we take pleasure--a pleasure so
deep that it touches the heart like melancholy--in the common drama
of the opera? How gay and joyous is the beginning! Mirth, hilarity,
entrancing sound, brilliant color, the note of a trumpet calling to
heroism, the beseeching of the concordant strings, and the soft flute
inviting to pleasure; scenes placid, pastoral, innocent; light-hearted
love, the dance on the green, the stately pageant in the sunlit streets,
the court, the ball, the mad splendor of life. And then love becomes
passion, and passion thwarted hurries on to sin, and sin lifts to the
heights of the immortal, sweetly smiling gods, and plunges to the depths
of despair. In vain the orchestra, the inevitable accompaniment of life,
warns and pleads and admonishes; calm has gone, and gayety has gone;
there is no sweetness now but in the wildness of surrender and of
sacrifice. How sad are the remembered strains that aforetime were
incentives to love and promises of happiness! Gloom settles upon the
scene; Mephisto, the only radiant one, flits across it, and mocks
the poor broken-he