, intermit with joy
that all the world has been so blind.

CAUTIOUSLY THE YOUTH ADVANCES

toward his prey. The expedition is one of tremendous importance,
therefore his exceeding amount of thought. When he is in the ineffable
presence, he is there as an actor in a tragedy, or as a tenor in an
opera. He has almost counted his hairs; he certainly counts the winkings
of his eyelids! Can any detail be unimportant in an undertaking of such
measureless risk? It is no wonder, then, that a young man who is giving
as much thought as this to a young, thoughtless girl is not worth much
in his business for the time being! In fact, it is a miracle to him,
after

SOME DOOMFUL FROWN

from his queen, that he has survived the night and goes to his work at
all! He is confident that it is base habit. "O, that this too too solid
flesh would melt!" he cries, as his dissatisfied employer, or father,
requires some reasonable action and fails to get it. In after-life this
same young man is glad the "grand passion" will never come to him again.
He feels that it has not heightened him in his own regard. His love may
have been smooth or it may have been swallowed in the quicksands of
adversity--the difference is small. It is not creditable to the human
brain to be so hoodwinked and purblind as Cupid makes his victims. But

LOVE RULES THE UNIVERSE,

having its climax in God himself, and its earthly ideality in the
mother's affection. We should not complain that when the potent essence
is first administered to us it shakes us seriously. Without this
passion, selfishness would triumph, and man would not take on the cares
of wedded life. Society and religion would wither. The world would be a
howling den of chaos and deep crime.

HOW HAVE THE SAGES LOOKED UPON LOVE?

I think they are inclined to praise it, as a whole--to indorse it merely
as a sensation, a passing gratification. It has always, on the contrary,
seemed to me like an exquisitely painful means to an exquisitely
beautiful end. The warm genial love of the home--the love which is as an
open grate, cheerful, and which is without those thunderstorms needful
to clear the heavily charged atmosphere of youthful love--pleases and
repays me for "the dangers I have passed." "The greatest pleasure of
life is love," says Sir William Temple. "Love is like the hunter," says
Ralph Waldo Emerson, "who cares not for the game when once caught,
which he may have pursued with the most inten