ne exactly similar to ourselves,
in spirit and form, is born also, and that a secret and unintelligible
sympathy preserves that likeness, even through the vicissitudes of
fortune and circumstance, until, in the same point of time, the two
beings are resolved once more into the elements of earth: confess that
there is something welcome, though unfounded in the fancy, and that
there are few of the substances of worldly honour which one would not
renounce, to possess, in the closest and fondest of all relations, this
shadow of ourselves!"

"Alas!" said St. John, "the possession, like all earthly blessings,
carries within it its own principle of corruption. The deadliest foe to
love is not change nor misfortune nor jealousy nor wrath, nor anything
that flows from passion or emanates from fortune; the deadliest foe to
it is custom! With custom die away the delusions and the mysteries which
encircle it; leaf after leaf, in the green poetry on which its beauty
depends, droops and withers, till nothing but the bare and rude trunk
is left. With all passion the soul demands something unexpressed, some
vague recess to explore or to marvel upon,--some veil upon the mental as
well as the corporeal deity. Custom leaves nothing to romance, and often
but little to respect. The whole character is bared before us like
a plain, and the heart's eye grows wearied with the sameness of the
survey. And to weariness succeeds distaste, and to distaste one of the
myriad shapes of the Proteus Aversion; so that the passion we would
make the rarest of treasures fritters down to a very instance of the
commonest of proverbs,--and out of familiarity cometh indeed contempt!"

"And are we, then," said I, "forever to forego the most delicious of our
dreams? Are we to consider love as an entire delusion, and to reconcile
ourselves to an eternal solitude of heart? What, then, shall fill the
crying and unappeasable void of our souls? What shall become of those
mighty sources of tenderness which, refused all channel in the rocky
soil of the world, must have an outlet elsewhere or stagnate into
torpor?"

"Our passions," said St. John, "are restless, and will make each
experiment in their power, though vanity be the result of all.
Disappointed in love, they yearn towards ambition; _and the object of
ambition, unlike that of love, never being wholly possessed, ambition is
the more durable passion of the two_. But sooner or later even that and
all passions are