o!" said Philip, strongly. "Reason is cold and sensuality hateful; a
man of any feeling must feed his imagination; there must be a woman of
whom he can dream."

"That is," put in some more critical auditor, "whom he can love as a
woman loves a man."

"For want of the experience of such a passion," Malbone went on,
unheeding, "nobody comprehends Petrarch. Philosophers and sensualists
all refuse to believe that his dream of Laura went on, even when he had
a mistress and a child. Why not? Every one must have something to which
his dreams can cling, amid the degradations of actual life, and this tie
is more real than the degradation; and if he holds to the tie, it will
one day save him."

"What is the need of the degradation?" put in the clear-headed Harry.

"None, except in weakness," said Philip. "A stronger nature may escape
it. Good God! do I not know how Petrarch must have felt? What sorrow
life brings! Suppose a man hopelessly separated from one whom he
passionately loves. Then, as he looks up at the starry sky, something
says to him: 'You can bear all these agonies of privation, loss of
life, loss of love,--what are they? If the tie between you is what you
thought, neither life nor death, neither folly nor sin, can keep her
forever from you.' Would that one could always feel so! But I am weak.
Then comes impulse, it thirsts for some immediate gratification; I
yield, and plunge into any happiness since I cannot obtain her. Then
comes quiet again, with the stars, and I bitterly reproach myself for
needing anything more than that stainless ideal. And so, I fancy, did
Petrarch."

Philip was getting into a dangerous mood with his sentimentalism. No
lawful passion can ever be so bewildering or ecstatic as an unlawful
one. For that which is right has all the powers of the universe on
its side, and can afford to wait; but the wrong, having all those
vast forces against it, must hurry to its fulfilment, reserve nothing,
concentrate all its ecstasies upon to-day. Malbone, greedy of emotion,
was drinking to the dregs a passion that could have no to-morrow.

Sympathetic persons are apt to assume that every refined emotion must
be ennobling. This is not true of men like Malbone, voluptuaries of the
heart. He ordinarily got up a passion very much as Lord Russell got up
an appetite,--he, of Spence's Anecdotes, who went out hunting for that
sole purpose, and left the chase when the sensation came. Malbone did
not leave his mo