damage to any one but himself;--that was the life
which he had planned for himself. His Aunt Stanbury had not read
his character altogether wrongly, as he thought, when she had once
declared that decency and godliness were both distasteful to him.
Would it not be destruction to such a one as he was, to fall into an
interminable engagement with any girl, let her be ever so sweet?

But yet, he felt as he sat there, filling pipe after pipe, smoking
away till past midnight, that though he could not bear the idea of
trammels, though he was totally unfit for matrimony, either present
or in prospect,--he felt that he had within his breast a double
identity, and that that other division of himself would be utterly
crushed if it were driven to divest itself of the idea of love.
Whence was to come his poetry, the romance of his life, the springs
of clear water in which his ignoble thoughts were to be dipped till
they should become pure, if love was to be banished altogether from
the list of delights that were possible to him? And then he began
to speculate on love,--that love of which poets wrote, and of which
he found that some sparkle was necessary to give light to his life.
Was it not the one particle of divine breath given to man, of which
he had heard since he was a boy? And how was this love to be come
at, and was it to be a thing of reality, or merely an idea? Was
it a pleasure to be attained, or a mystery that charmed by the
difficulties of the distance,--a distance that never could be so
passed that the thing should really be reached? Was love to be
ever a delight, vague as is that feeling of unattainable beauty
which far-off mountains give, when you know that you can never
place yourself amidst their unseen valleys? And if love could be
reached,--the love of which the poets sing, and of which his own
heart was ever singing,--what were to be its pleasures? To press a
hand, to kiss a lip, to clasp a waist, to hear even the low voice of
the vanquished, confessing loved one as she hides her blushing cheek
upon your shoulder,--what is it all but to have reached the once
mysterious valley of your far-off mountain, and to have found that it
is as other valleys,--rocks and stones, with a little grass, and a
thin stream of running water? But beyond that pressure of the hand,
and that kissing of the lips,--beyond that short-lived pressure of
the plumage which is common to birds and men,--what could love do
beyond that? There we