xpressed, these are the most dangerous, the most seductive aliment of
thought to a delicate and sensitive nature. If things were said out,
they might not be said wisely,--they might repel by their freedom, or
disturb by their unfitness; but what is only looked is sent into the
soul through the imagination, which makes of it all that the ideal
faculties desire.

In a refined and exalted nature, it is very seldom that the feeling of
love, when once thoroughly aroused, bears any sort of relation to the
reality of the object. It is commonly an enkindling of the whole power
of the soul's love for whatever she considers highest and fairest; it
is, in fact, the love of something divine and unearthly, which, by a
sort of illusion, connects itself with a personality. Properly speaking,
there is but One true, eternal Object of all that the mind conceives, in
this trance of its exaltation. Disenchantment must come, of course; and
in a love which terminates in happy marriage, there is a tender and
gracious process, by which, without shock or violence, the ideal is
gradually sunk in the real, which, though found faulty and earthly, is
still ever tenderly remembered as it seemed under the morning light of
that enchantment.

What Mary loved so passionately, that which came between her and God in
every prayer, was not the gay, young, dashing sailor,--sudden in anger,
imprudent of speech, and, though generous in heart, yet worldly in plans
and schemings,--but her own ideal of a grand and noble man,--such a man
as she thought he might become. He stood glorified before her, an image
of the strength that overcomes things physical, of the power of command
which controls men and circumstances, of the courage which disdains
fear, of the honor which cannot lie, of constancy which knows no shadow
of turning, of tenderness which protects the weak, and, lastly, of
religious loyalty which should lay the golden crown of its perfected
manhood at the feet of a Sovereign Lord and Redeemer. This was the man
she loved, and with this regal mantle of glories she invested the person
called James Marvyn; and all that she saw and felt to be wanting she
prayed for with the faith of a believing woman.

Nor was she wrong;--for, as to every leaf and every flower there is an
ideal to which the growth of the plant is constantly urging, so is there
an ideal to every human being,--a perfect form in which it might appear,
were every defect removed and every charact