can show nothing comparable to that light, graceful figure of the girl just blooming into perfect womanhood.  Imagination cannot go beyond it.  There is all the marvel, if you think of it, in that slight figure, as she treads across the carpet of a modern drawing-room, that has ever been expressed in, or given origin to, the nymphs, goddesses, and angels that the fancy of man has teemed with.  I declare that a pious heathen would as soon insult the august statue of Minerva herself, as would any civilized being treat that slender form with the least show of rudeness and indignity.  A Chartist, indeed, or a Leveller, would do it; but it would pain him—­he would be a martyr to his principles.  Verily we are slaves to the fair miracle!”

“Well,” said his companion, who had all this time been leisurely pulling to pieces some wild flowers he had gathered in the course of the morning’s ramble, “what does it all end in?  What, at last, but the old story—­love and a marriage?”

“Love often where there is no possibility of marriage,” replied Darcy, starting up altogether from his recumbent posture, and pacing to and fro under the shadow of the tree.  “The full heart, how often does it swell only to feel the pressure of the iron bond of poverty!  This very sentiment, which our cultivation refines, fosters, makes supreme, is encountered by that harsh and cruel evil which grows also with the growth of civilization—­poverty—­civilized poverty.  Oh, ’tis a frightful thing, this well-born, well-bred poverty!  There is a pauper state, which, loathsome as it is to look upon, yet brings with it a callousness to endure all inflictions, and a recklessness that can seize with avidity whatever coarse fragments of pleasure the day or the hour may afford.  But this poverty applies itself to nerves strung for the subtlest happiness.  No torpor here; no moments of rash and unscrupulous gratification—­unreflected on, unrepented of—­which being often repeated make, in the end, a large sum of human life; but the heart incessantly demands a genuine and enduring happiness, and is incessantly denied.  It is a poverty which even helps to keep alive the susceptibility it tortures; for the man who has never loved, or been the object of affection, whose heart has been fed only by an untaught imagination, feels a passion—­feels a regret—­it may be far more than commensurate with that envied reality which life possesses and withholds from him.  No! there is nothing in the circle of human existence more fearful to contemplate than this perpetual divorce—­irrevocable, yet pronounced anew each instant of our lives—­between the soul and its best affections.  And—­look you!—­this misery passes along the world under the mask of easy indifference, and wears a smiling face, and submits to be rallied by the wit, and assumes itself the air of vulgar jocularity.  Oh, this penury that goes well clad, and is warmly housed, and makes a mock of its own anguish—­I’d rather die on the wheel, or be starved to death in a dungeon!