id
Jenny; "they are only to be taken as the invariable bay-leaf which
Professor Blot introduces into all his recipes for soups and stews,--a
little elegant bitterness, to be kept tastefully in the background.
You see now, papa, I should like the vocation of being beautiful. It
would just suit me to wear point-lace and jewelry, and to have life
revolve round me, as some beautiful star, and feel that I had nothing
to do but shine and refresh the spirits of all gazers, and that in
this way I was truly useful, and fulfilling the great end of my being;
but alas for this doctrine! all women have not beauty. The most of us
can only hope not to be called ill-looking, and, when we get ourselves
up with care, to look fresh and trim and agreeable; which fact
interferes with the theory."

"Well, for my part," said young Rudolph, "I go for the theory of the
beautiful. If ever I marry, it is to find an asylum for ideality. I
don't want to make a culinary marriage or a business partnership. I
want a being whom I can keep in a sphere of poetry and beauty, out of
the dust and grime of every-lay life."

"Then," said Mr. Theophilus, "you must either be a rich man in your
own right, or your fair ideal must have a handsome fortune of her
own."

"I never will marry a rich wife," quoth Rudolph. "My wife must be
supported by me, not I by her."

Rudolph is another of the habitues of our chimney-corner, representing
the order of young knighthood in America, and his dreams and fancies,
if impracticable, are always of a kind to make every one think him a
good fellow. He who has no romantic dreams at twenty-one will be a
horribly dry peascod at fifty; therefore it is that I gaze reverently
at all Rudolph's chateaus in Spain, which want nothing to complete
them except solid earth to stand on.

"And pray," said Theophilus, "how long will it take a young lawyer or
physician, starting with no heritage but his own brain, to create a
sphere of poetry and beauty in which to keep his goddess? How much a
year will be necessary, as the English say, to _do_ this garden of
Eden, whereinto shall enter only the poetry of life?"

"I don't know. I haven't seen it near enough to consider. It is
because I know the difficulty of its attainment that I have no present
thoughts of marriage. Marriage is to me in the bluest of all blue
distances,--far off, mysterious, and dreamy as the Mountains of the
Moon or sources of the Nile. It shall come only when I have se