Most of our fiercest struggles for
life have no adequate reason: it is not so necessary for us to live as
we think it is. That we do not get what we want, or that we sink beneath
our load of trouble, signifies little in the aggregate of the world's
history. But, all the same, our cries of despair go up to Heaven, and
there seems no need in the universe so absolute, so final, as that we
ourselves should live and be happy.

It is hard for a man of middle age, with a cool brain and tranquillized
passions, to retrace the history of his youth. There is much that he
must smile over--much, too, which is irksome for him to dwell upon. Many
experiences which in their freshness seemed holy and sacred, in after
years, stripped of their disguise of false sentiment and the aureole
with which they were invested by youthful imagination, become absolutely
loathsome--just as when we see tamely by daylight the tawdry stage which
last night made a world for us full of all the paraphernalia of high
romanticism--silver and velvet robes, plumed hats, dim woodland vistas
and the echo of a distant high note, youthful beauty, rope-ladders,
balconies, daggers, poison, and passionate love-strains. This skeleton
framework of the illusion, these well-worn contrivances, tarnished gold
lace and mock splendors, disenchant us sadly, and what we took for

Horns of Elfland faintly blowing!
Blow, let us hear the purple glens replying:
Blow, bugle: answer, echoes, dying, dying, dying,

is now discovered to be a cheap-trumpet imitation of the enchanted
notes we dreamed of hearing.

After Miss Lenox returned from the Point she was, as I have said, a
little pensive: this little shadow upon the splendor of her beauty lent
a subtlety and charm to her manner. If there had been a fault in her
loveliness before, it was that it remained always equal: the same light
seemed always to play over face and hair, the liquid clearness of her
eyes was always undimmed, and there was a trifle of over-robustness
about the rounded contours of her figure. In spite of all her beauty, it
had at times been hard for me to realize that she was a woman to give
herself thoroughly to love. I had already had many dreams of her, yet
never one where I thought she could have given me the infinite softness
of a caressing touch or feel the motherly quality which lies at the
bottom of every true woman's love for man. Now the splendor of her eyes
was veiled, her smile was half melanc