The woman a man loves is always his own daughter, far more his daughter than the female children born to him by the common law of life.  It is not the outside woman, who takes his name, that he loves:  before her image has reached the centre of his consciousness, it has passed through fifty many-layered nerve-strainers, been churned over by ten thousand pulse-beats, and reacted upon by millions of lateral impulses which bandy it about through the mental spaces as a reflection is sent back and forward in a saloon lined with mirrors.  With this altered image of the woman before him his preexisting ideal becomes blended.  The object of his love is half the offspring of her legal parents and half of her lover’s brain.  The difference between the real and the ideal objects of love must not exceed a fixed maximum.  The heart’s vision cannot unite them stereoscopically into a single image, if the divergence passes certain limits.  A formidable analogy, much in the nature of a proof, with very serious consequences, which moralists and match-makers would do well to remember!  Double vision with the eyes of the heart is a dangerous physiological state, and may lead to missteps and serious falls.

Whether Dudley Venner would ever find a breathing image near enough to his ideal one, to fill the desolate chamber of his heart, or not, was very doubtful.  Some gracious and gentle woman, whose influence would steal upon him as the first low words of prayer after that interval of silent mental supplication known to one of our simpler forms of public worship, gliding into his consciousness without hurting its old griefs, herself knowing the chastening of sorrow, and subdued into sweet acquiescence with the Divine will,—­some such woman as this, if Heaven should send him such, might call him back to the world of happiness, from which he seemed forever exiled.  He could never again be the young lover who walked through the garden-alleys all red with roses in the old dead and buried June of long ago.  He could never forget the bride of his youth, whose image, growing phantom-like with the lapse of years, hovered over him like a dream while waking and like a reality in dreams.  But if it might be in God’s good providence that this desolate life should come under the influence of human affections once more, what an ecstasy of renewed existence was in store for him!  His life had not all been buried under that narrow ridge of turf with the white stone at its head.  It seemed so for a while; but it was not and could not and ought not to be so.  His first passion had been a true and pure one; there was no spot or stain upon it.  With all his grief there blended no cruel recollection of any word or look he would have wished to forget.  All those little differences, such as young married people with any individual flavor in their characters must have, if they are tolerably mated, had only added to the music of existence, as the lesser discords admitted into some perfect symphony, fitly resolved, add richness