my
happiness.

On my arrival now at Isora's, I found her already stationed at the
window, watching for my coming. How her dark eyes lit into lustre when
they saw me! How the rich blood mantled up under the soft cheek which
feeling had refined of late into a paler hue than it was wont, when I
first gazed upon it, to wear! Then how sprang forth her light step to
meet me! How trembled her low voice to welcome me! How spoke, from
every gesture of her graceful form, the anxious, joyful, all-animating
gladness of her heart! It is a melancholy pleasure to the dry, harsh
afterthoughts of later life, to think one has been thus loved; and one
marvels, when one considers what one is now, how it could have ever
been! That love _of ours_ was never made for after years! It could never
have flowed into the common and cold channel of ordinary affairs! It
could never have been mingled with the petty cares and the low objects
with which the loves of all who live long together in this sordid and
most earthly earth are sooner or later blended! We could not have spared
to others an atom of the great wealth of our affection. We were misers
of every coin in that boundless treasury. It would have pierced me to
the soul to have seen Isora smile upon another. I know not even, had we
had children, if I should not have been jealous of my child! Was this
selfish love? yes, it was, intensely, wholly selfish; but it was a love
made so only by its excess; nothing selfish on a smaller scale polluted
it. There was not on earth that which the one would not have forfeited
at the lightest desire of the other. So utterly were happiness and Isora
entwined together that I could form no idea of the one with which the
other was not connected. Was this love made for the many and miry roads
through which man must travel? Was it made for age, or, worse than age,
for those cool, ambitious, scheming years that we call mature, in which
all the luxuriance and verdure of things are pared into tame shapes that
mimic life, but a life that is estranged from Nature, in which art
is the only beauty and regularity the only grace? No, in my heart
of hearts, I feel that our love was not meant for the stages of life
through which I have already passed; it would have made us miserable to
see it fritter itself away, and to remember what it once was. Better
as it is! better to mourn over the green bough than to look upon the
sapless stem. You who now glance over these pages, are y