Distance may lend enchantment to those whom we prefer to appreciate from afar, but nearness is the real enchantment to your true lover, and distance is his natural enemy.  Distance and the slow-footedness of Time are his immemorial evils.  Both of these modern science has all but annihilated.  Consider for a moment the conditions under which love was carried on in those old days which some people find so romantic.  Think what a comparatively short distance meant then, with snail-paced precarious mails, and the only means of communication horses by land, and sailing ships by sea.  How men and women had the courage to go on long journeys at all away from each other in those days is hard to realize, knowing what an impenetrable curtain of silence and mystery immediately fell between them with the winding of the coach horn, or the last wave of the plumed hat as it disappeared behind the last turning of the road—­leaving those at home with nothing for company but the yearning horizon and the aching, uncommunicative hours.  Days, weeks, months, even years, must go by in waiting for a word—­and when at last it came, brought on lumbering wheels or at best by some courier on his steaming mud-splashed mount, precious as it was, it was already grown old and cold and perhaps long since untrue.

Imagine perhaps being dependent for one’s heart news on some chance soldier limping back from the wars, or some pilgrim from the Holy Land with scallop shell and staff!

Distance was indeed a form of death under such conditions—­no wonder men made their wills as they set out on a journey—­and when actual physical death did not intervene, how much of that slow death-in-life, that fading of the memory and that numbing of the affections which absence too often brings, was even still more to be feared.  The loved face might indeed return, looking much the same as when it went away, but what of the heart that went a-journeying, too?  What even of the hearts that remained at home?

The chances of death and disaster not even modern science can forestall, though even these it has considerably lessened; but that other death of the heart, which comes of the slow starvation of silence and absence, it may be held to have all but vanquished.  Thanks to its weird magicians, you may be seas or continents away from her whom your soul loveth, yet “at her window bid good-morrow” as punctually as if you lived next door; or serenade her by electricity—­at all hours of the night.  If you sigh in New York, she can hear you and sigh back in San Francisco; and soon her very face will be carried to you at any moment of the day along the magic wires.  Nor will you need to wait for the postman, but be able to read her flowerlike words as they write themselves out on the luminous slate before you, at the very moment as she leans her fragrant bosom upon her electric desk three thousand miles away.  If this isn’t romantic, one may well ask what is!