r the painful tone of the home
letters; but the bracing country air, and the pretty faces of the
village girls, heal your heart--with fresh wounds.

The old Doctor sees dimly through his spectacles; and his pew gives a
good look-out upon the smiling choir of singers. A collegian wears the
honors of a stranger, and the country bucks stand but poor chance in
contrast with your wonderful attainments in cravats and verses. 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.

But this cannot last. As the years drop off, a certain pair of eyes beam
one day upon you that seem to have been cut out of a page of Greek
poetry. They have all its sentiment, its fire, its intellectual reaches:
it would be hard to say what they have not. The profile is a Greek
profile, and the heavy chestnut hair is plaited in Greek bands. The
figure, too, might easily be that of Helen, or of Andromache.

You gaze, ashamed to gaze; and your heart yearns, ashamed of its
yearning. It is no young girl who is thus testing you: there is too
much pride for that. A ripeness and maturity rest upon her look and
figure that completely fill up that ideal which exaggerated fancies have
wrought out of the Grecian heaven. The vision steals upon you at all
hours,--now rounding its flowing outline to the melli