ike that of meteorology. We know that
just about so much rain will fall in a season; but on what particular
day it will shower is more than we can tell. We know that just about so
much love will be made every year in a given population; but who will
rain his young affections upon the heart of whom is not known except to
the astrologers and fortune-tellers. And why rain falls as it does and
why love is made just as it is are equally puzzling questions.

The woman a man loves is always his own daughter, far more his daughter
than the female children born to him by the common law of life. It is
not the outside woman, who takes his name, that he loves: before her
image has reached the centre of his consciousness, it has passed through
fifty many-layered nerve-strainers, been churned over by ten thousand
pulse-beats, and reacted upon by millions of lateral impulses which
bandy it about through the mental spaces as a reflection is sent back
and forward in a saloon lined with mirrors. With this altered image of
the woman before him, his preexisting ideal becomes blended. The object
of his love is in part the offspring of her legal parents, but more of
her lover's brain. The difference between the real and the ideal objects
of love must not exceed a fixed maximum. The heart's vision cannot unite
them stereoscopically into a single image, if the divergence passes
certain limits. A formidable analogy, much in the nature of a proof,
with very serious consequences, which moralists and match-makers would
do well to remember! Double vision with the eyes of the heart is a
dangerous physiological state, and may lead to missteps and serious
falls.

Whether Dudley Veneer would ever find a breathing image near enough to
his ideal one, to fill the desolate chamber of his heart, or not, was
very doubtful. Some gracious and gentle woman, whose influence would
steal upon him as the first low words of prayer after that interval of
silent mental supplication known to one of our simpler forms of public
worship, gliding into his consciousness without hurting its old griefs,
herself knowing the chastening of sorrow, and subdued into sweet
acquiescence with the Divine will,--some such woman as this, if Heaven
should send him such, might call him back to the world of happiness,
from which he seemed forever exiled. He could never again be the young
lover who walked through the garden-alleys all red with roses in the old
dead and buried June of long