to regretting that he “had not given greater attention to making money.”  Besides, as he wrote to his brother, “What should I do carrying a wife in a ship, and when I marry I do not mean to part with my wife.”  The cruising duty of the “Boreas” took her from port to port of the limited area embraced in the Leeward Islands Station, and Nevis was among the least important of the points demanding his attention.  He was, therefore, frequently away from his betrothed during this period, and absence rather fanned than cooled the impetuous ardor which he carried into all his undertakings.  Whether it were the pursuit of a love affair, or the chase of an enemy’s fleet, delays served only to increase the vehemence with which Nelson chafed against difficulties.  “Duty,” he tells Mrs. Nisbet, “is the great business of a sea officer,—­all private considerations must give way to it, however painful it is;” but he owns he wishes “the American vessels at the Devil, and the whole continent of America to boot,” because they detain him from her side.

There is no singularity in the experience that obstacles tend rather to inflame than to check a lover’s eagerness.  What is noteworthy in Nelson’s letters at this time is the utter absence of any illusions, of any tendency to exaggerate and glorify the qualities of the woman who for the nonce possessed his heart.  There is not a sign of the perturbation of feeling, of the stirring of the soul, that was afterwards so painfully elicited by another influence.  “The dear object,” he writes to his brother, “you must like.  Her sense, polite manners, and, to you I may say, beauty, you will much admire.  She possesses sense far superior to half the people of our acquaintance, and her manners are Mrs. Moutray’s.”  The same calm, measured tone pervades all his mention of her to others.  His letters to herself, on the other hand, are often pleasing in the quiet, simple, and generally unaffected tenderness which inspires them.  In a more ordinary man, destined to more commonplace fortunes, they might well be regarded as promising that enduring wedded love which strikes root downward and bears fruit upward, steadily growing in depth and devotion as the years roll by.  But Nelson was not an ordinary man, and from that more humble happiness a childless marriage further debarred him.  He could rise far higher, and, alas! descend far lower as he followed the radiant vision,—­the image of his own mind rather than an external reality,—­the ideal, which, whether in fame or in love, beckoned him onward.  The calm, even, and wholly matter-of-fact appreciation of his wife’s estimable traits can now be seen in the light of his after career, and its doubtful augury descried; for to idealize was an essential attribute of his temperament.  Her failure, even in the heyday of courtship, to arouse in him any extravagance of emotion, any illusive exaltation of her merits, left vacant that throne in his mind which could be permanently occupied only by a highly