Unfortunately, this was all romance,—­there was no such man.  There was, indeed, a person of very common, self-interested aims and worldly nature, whom she had credited at sight with an unlimited draft on all her better nature; and when the hour of discovery came, she awoke from her dream with a start and a laugh, and ever since has despised aspiration, and been busy with the realities of life, and feeds poor little Mary Jane, who sits by her in the opera-box there, with all the fruit which she has picked from the bitter tree of knowledge.  There is no end of the epigrams and witticisms which she can throw out, this elegant Mrs. T., on people who marry for love, lead prosy, worky lives, and put on their best cap with pink ribbons for Sunday.  “Mary Jane shall never make a fool of herself”; but, even as she speaks, poor Mary Jane’s heart is dying within her at the vanishing of a pair of whiskers from an opposite box,—­which whiskers the poor little fool has credited with a resume drawn from her own imaginings of all that is grandest and most heroic, most worshipful in man.  By-and-by, when Mrs. T. finds the glamour has fallen on her daughter, she wonders; she has “tried to keep novels out of the girl’s way,—­where did she get these notions?”

All prosaic, and all bitter, disenchanted people talk as if poets and novelists made romance.  They do,—­just as much as craters make volcanoes,—­no more.  What is romance? whence comes it?  Plato spoke to the subject wisely, in his quaint way, some two thousand years ago, when he said, “Man’s soul, in a former state, was winged and soared among the gods; and so it comes to pass, that, in this life, when the soul, by the power of music or poetry, or the sight of beauty, hath her remembrance quickened, forthwith there is a straggling and a pricking pain as of wings trying to come forth,—­even as children in teething.”  And if an old heathen, two thousand years ago, discoursed thus gravely of the romantic part of our nature, whence comes it that in Christian lands we think in so pagan a way of it, and turn the whole care of it to ballad-makers, romancers, and opera-singers?

Let us look up in fear and reverence and say, “GOD is the great maker of romance.  HE, from whose hand came man and woman,—­HE, who strung the great harp of Existence with all its wild and wonderful and manifold chords, and attuned them to one another,—­HE is the great Poet of life.”  Every impulse of beauty, of heroism, and every craving for purer love, fairer perfection, nobler type and style of being than that which closes like a prison-house around us, in the dim, daily walk of life, is God’s breath, God’s impulse, God’s reminder to the soul that there is something higher, sweeter, purer, yet to be attained.

Therefore, man or woman, when thy ideal is shattered,—­as shattered a thousand times it must be,—­when the vision fades, the rapture burns out, turn not away in skepticism and bitterness, saying, “There is nothing better for a man than that he should eat and drink,” but rather cherish the revelations of those hours as prophecies and foreshadowings of something real and possible, yet to be attained in the manhood, of immortality.  The scoffing spirit that laughs at romance is an apple of the Devil’s own handing from the bitter tree of knowledge;—­it opens the eyes only to see eternal nakedness.