e of both occurs to the mind as something
indelicate. To be altogether right, they should have had twin birth
together, at the same moment with the feeling that unites them. Then
indeed it would be simple and perfect and without reserve or
afterthought. Then they would understand each other with a fulness
impossible otherwise. There would be no barrier between them of
associations that cannot be imparted. They would be led into none of
those comparisons that send the blood back to the heart. And they would
know that there had been no time lost, and they had been together as
much as was possible. For besides terror for the separation that must
follow some time or other in the future, men feel anger, and something
like remorse, when they think of that other separation which endured
until they met. Some one has written that love makes people believe in
immortality, because there seems not to be room enough in life for so
great a tenderness, and it is inconceivable that the most masterful of
our emotions should have no more than the spare moments of a few years.
Indeed, it seems strange; but if we call to mind analogies, we can
hardly regard it as impossible.

"The blind bow-boy," who smiles upon us from the end of terraces in old
Dutch gardens, laughingly hails his bird-bolts among a fleeting
generation. But for as fast as ever he shoots, the game dissolves and
disappears into eternity from under his falling arrows; this one is gone
ere he is struck; the other has but time to make one gesture and give
one passionate cry; and they are all the things of a moment. When the
generation is gone, when the play is over, when the thirty years'
panorama has been withdrawn in tatters from the stage of the world, we
may ask what has become of these great, weighty, and undying loves, and
the sweethearts who despised mortal conditions in a fine credulity; and
they can only show us a few songs in a bygone taste, a few actions worth
remembering, and a few children who have retained some happy stamp from
the disposition of their parents.

IV

TRUTH OF INTERCOURSE

Among sayings that have a currency in spite of being wholly false upon
the face of them for the sake of a half-truth upon another subject which
is accidentally combined with the error, one of the grossest and
broadest conveys the monstrous proposition that it is easy to tell the
truth and hard to tell a lie. I wis