ight, and showing points of peril
that a man may march the more warily. And the true conclusion of this
paper is to turn our back on apprehensions, and embrace that shining and
courageous virtue, Faith. Hope is the boy, a blind, headlong, pleasant
fellow, good to chase swallows with the salt; Faith is the grave,
experienced, yet smiling man. Hope lives on ignorance; open-eyed Faith
is built upon a knowledge of our life, of the tyranny of circumstance
and the frailty of human resolution. Hope looks for unqualified success;
but Faith counts certainly on failure, and takes honourable defeat to be
a form of victory. Hope is a kind old pagan; but Faith grew up in
Christian days, and early learnt humility. In the one temper, a man is
indignant that he cannot spring up in a clap to heights of elegance and
virtue; in the other, out of a sense of his infirmities, he is filled
with confidence because a year has come and gone, and he has still
preserved some rags of honour. In the first, he expects an angel for a
wife; in the last, he knows that she is like himself--erring,
thoughtless, and untrue; but like himself also, filled with a struggling
radiancy of better things, and adorned with ineffective qualities. You
may safely go to school with hope; but ere you marry, should have
learned the mingled lesson of the world; that dolls are stuffed with
sawdust, and yet are excellent playthings; that hope and love address
themselves to a perfection never realised, and yet, firmly held, become
the salt and staff of life; that you yourself are compacted of
infirmities, perfect, you might say, in imperfection, and yet you have a
something in you lovable and worth preserving; and that, while the mass
of mankind lies under this scurvy condemnation, you will scarce find
one, but, by some generous reading, will become to you a lesson, a
model, and a noble spouse through life. So thinking, you will constantly
support your own unworthiness, and easily forgive the failings of your
friend. Nay, you will be wisely glad that you retain the sense of
blemishes; for the faults of married people continually spur up each of
them, hour by hour, to do better and to meet and love upon a higher
ground. And ever, between the failures, there will come glimpses of kind
virtues to encourage and console.

FOOTNOTE:

[3] Browning's "The Ring and the Book."

III

ON FALLING IN LOVE