n shows that there are as many charms in life to be found on
the _Penseroso_ side of it as there are on the _Allegro_."

LADY GLENALVON.--"Kenelm, you saved the life of my poor son, and when,
later, he was taken from me, I felt as if he had commended you to my
care. When at the age of sixteen, with a boy's years and a man's heart,
you came to London, did I not try to be to you almost as a mother? and
did you not often tell me that you could confide to me the secrets of
your heart more readily than to any other?"

"You were to me," said Kenelm, with emotion, "that most precious and
sustaining good genius which a youth can find at the threshold of
life,--a woman gently wise, kindly sympathizing, shaming him by the
spectacle of her own purity from all grosser errors, elevating him from
mean tastes and objects by the exquisite, ineffable loftiness of soul
which is only found in the noblest order of womanhood. Come, I will open
my heart to you still. I fear it is more wayward than ever. It still
feels estranged from the companionship and pursuits natural to my age
and station. However, I have been seeking to brace and harden my nature,
for the practical ends of life, by travel and adventure, chiefly among
rougher varieties of mankind than we meet in drawing-rooms. Now, in
compliance with the duty I owe to my dear father's wishes, I come back
to these circles, which under your auspices I entered in boyhood, and
which even then seemed to me so inane and artificial. Take a part in the
world of these circles; such is your wish. My answer is brief. I have
been doing my best to acquire a motive power, and have not succeeded. I
see nothing that I care to strive for, nothing that I care to gain. The
very times in which we live are to me, as to Hamlet, out of joint; and
I am not born like Hamlet to set them right. Ah! if I could look on
society through the spectacles with which the poor hidalgo in 'Gil Blas'
looked on his meagre board,--spectacles by which cherries appear the
size of peaches, and tomtits as large as turkeys! The imagination which
is necessary to ambition is a great magnifier."

"I have known more than one man, now very eminent, very active, who
at your age felt the same estrangement from the practical pursuits of
others."

"And what reconciled those men to such pursuits?"

"That diminished sense of individual personality, that unconscious
fusion of one's own being into other existences, which belong to home
and