reatures pass us,
unregarding, by. And, indeed, it may happen that a man who has won what
is for him the fairest of all fair faces, and has it still by his side,
may enter sometimes, without disloyalty, that secret gallery of those
other fair faces that were his before hers, in whom they are all summed
up and surpassed, had dawned upon his life. We shall hardly be loyal to
the present if we are coldly disloyal to the past. In the lover's
calendar, while there is but one Madonna, there must still be minor
saints, to whom it is meet, at certain times and seasons, to offer
retrospective candles--saints that, after the manner of many saints,
were once such charming sinners for our sakes, that utter forgetfulness
of them were an impious boorishness surely unacceptable to the most
jealous of Madonnas. Public worship of them is not, of course,
desirable, but occasional private celebrations are surely more than
permissible--such celebrations as that "night of memory and tears" which
Landor consecrated to Rose Aylmer, or that song which Thackeray
consecrated to certain loves of the long ago--

Gillian's dead, God rest her bier,
How I loved her twenty years syne!
Marian's married, but I sit here,
Alone and merry at forty year,
Dipping my nose in the Gascon wine.

So I, seated in my haunted restaurant, brought the burnt offerings of
several cigars, and poured out various libations to my own private
Gillians and Marians, and in fancy sat and looked into Angelica's eyes
at this table, and caressed Myrtle's opaled hand at that, and read
Sylvia a poem I had just written for her at still another. "Whose names
are five sweet symphonies," wrote Rossetti. Yes, symphonies, indeed, in
the ears of memory are the names of the lightest loves that flittered
butterfly-like across our path in the golden summer of our lives,
each name calling up its human counterpart, with her own endearing
personality distinguishing her from all other girls, her way of
smiling, her way of talking, her way of being serious, all the little
originalities on which she prided herself, her so solemnly held
differentia of tastes and manners--all, in a word, that made you realize
that you were dining with Corinna and not with Chloe. What a service of
contrast each--all unwittingly, need one say--did the other, just in the
same fashion as contrasting colours accentuate the special quality one
of the other. To have d