nversation to every one, began conversing with me upon the lighter
topics of the day; these we soon exhausted, and at last we settled upon
that of love and women.

"I own," said I, "that, in this respect, pleasure has disappointed as
well as wearied me. I have longed for some better object of worship than
the trifler of fashion, or the yet more ignoble minion of the senses.
I ask a vent for enthusiasm, for devotion, for romance, for a thousand
subtle and secret streams of unuttered and unutterable feeling. I often
think that I bear within me the desire and the sentiment of poetry,
though I enjoy not its faculty of expression; and that that desire and
that sentiment, denied legitimate egress, centre and shrink into one
absorbing passion,--which is the want of love. Where am I to satisfy
this want? I look round these great circles of gayety which we term
the world; I send forth my heart as a wanderer over their regions
and recesses, and it returns, sated and palled and languid, to myself
again."

"You express a common want in every less worldly or more morbid nature,"
said St. John; "a want which I myself have experienced, and if I had
never felt it, I should never, perhaps, have turned to ambition to
console or to engross me. But do not flatter yourself that the want will
ever be fulfilled. Nature places us alone in this hospitable world, and
no heart is cast in a similar mould to that which we bear within us. We
pine for sympathy; we make to ourselves a creation of ideal beauties, in
which we expect to find it: but the creation has no reality; it is the
mind's phantasma which the mind adores; and it is because the phantasma
can have no actual being that the mind despairs. Throughout life, from
the cradle to the grave, it is no real living thing which we demand; it
is the realization of the idea we have formed within us, and which, as
we are not gods, we can never call into existence. We are enamoured of
the statue ourselves have graven; but, unlike the statue of the Cyprian,
it kindles not to our homage nor melts to our embraces."

"I believe you," said I; "but it is hard to undeceive ourselves. The
heart is the most credulous of all fanatics, and its ruling passion the
most enduring of all superstitions. Oh! what can tear from us, to the
last, the hope, the desire, the yearning for some bosom which, while it
mirrors our own, parts not with the reflection! I have read that, in the
very hour and instant of our birth, o