s without superfine cavillings. But there are
earlier, less awful and secret compensations, and these it is as well to
know about, and to prepare our soul serenely to enjoy when the moment
comes.

Of this kind are, of course, those autumn flowerings of sentiment
alluded to in Madame de Hauterive's letter. They are blossomings
sometimes sweeter than those of summer, thanks to the very scorching of
summer's suns; or else touched with an austere vividness by the first
frosts, like the late china roses, which are streaked, where they open,
with a vermillion unparalleled in their earlier sisters. Compare with
this all that is implied in Swinburne's line, "the month of the long
decline of roses." Think of those roses (I have before my eyes a
Florentine terrace at the end of May) crowding each other out, blowing,
withering, and dropping; roses white, red, pale lemon, and, alas! also
brown and black with mildew, living and dying in such riotous excess
that you have neither time nor inclination to pluck one of them, and
keep it, piously in water, before you on your table.

Mind, I do not say that such profusion is not all right and necessary
in its season. The economy of Nature is often wasteful. There might be
no roses at all next year if we depended for seed and slips upon those
frost-bitten flowers with their fine austerity. And in the same way
that, despite the pathetic tenderness of long-deferred father or
motherhood, it is better for the race that infants be brought into the
world plentiful, helter-skelter, and that only the toughest stay
there; so, methinks, it may be needful that youth be full of false
starts, mistaken vocations, lapsed engagements, fanciful friendships
broken off in quarrel, glowing passions ending in ashes; nay, that
this period, fertile in good and evil, be crowned by marriages such as
are said to be made in heaven, no doubt because the great match-making
spirit of life pursues ends unguessed by human wisdom, which would
often remain in single blessedness, and found homes for sickly
infants. Wedlock, in other words, and, for the matter of that, father
and motherhood, and most of the serious business of the universe,
should not be looked upon as a compensation or consolation, but rather
as something for which poor human creatures require to be consoled and
compensated.

Having admitted which, and even suggested that marriages are fittest at
the age of Daphnis and Chloe, or even of Amelia and George