e
breasted his sorrow manfully and alone. Instead of which, he shuffled
himself and his misery upon poor simple Jane, getting all the solace he
could from her, and leading her a wretched, almost hopeless life for
years. This is what we are to admire! This is the knight without
reproach! This is to be Faithful Forever! I suppose Coventry Patmore
thinks Frederic is to be commended because he did not break into
Honoria's house and run away with her. That is the only thing he could
have done worse than he did do, and that I have no doubt he would have
done if he could. I have no faith in the honor or the virtue of men or
women who will marry where they do not love. I think it is just as
sinful--and a thousand times as vile--to marry unlovingly, as to love
unlawfully.[*]

[*] Some one just here suggests that it was Jane who was faithful
forever, not Frederic. That indeed makes the title appropriate, but
does not relieve the atrocity of the plot.

There is this about mountains,--you cannot get away from them. Low
country may be beautiful, yet you may be preoccupied and pass through
it or by it without consciousness; but the mountains rise, and there is
no escape. Representatives of an unseen force, voices from an infinite
past, benefactors of the valleys, themselves unblest, almoners of a
charity which leaves them in the heights indeed, but the heights of
eternal desolation, raised above all sympathies, all tenderness,
shining but repellent, grand and cold, mighty and motionless,--we stand
before them hushed. They fix us with their immutability. They shroud
us with their Egyptian gloom. They sadden. They awe. They overpower.
Yet far off how different is the impression! Bright and beautiful,
evanescent yet unchanging, lovely as a spirit with their clear, soft
outlines and misty resplendence! Exquisitely says Winthrop: "There is
nothing so refined as the outline of a distant mountain; even a
rose-leaf is stiff-edged and harsh in comparison. Nothing else has
that definite indefiniteness, that melting permanence, that evanescing
changelessness. [I did not know that I was using his terms.] Clouds
in vain strive to imitate it; they are made of slighter stuff; they can
be blunt or ragged, but they cannot have that solid positiveness. Even
in its cloudy, distant fairness, there is a concise, emphatic reality
altogether uncloudlike."

Seeing them from afar, lovely rather than terrible, we feel that though
betwee