CAUTIOUSLY THE YOUTH ADVANCES

toward his prey.  The expedition is one of tremendous importance, therefore his exceeding amount of thought.  When he is in the ineffable presence, he is there as an actor in a tragedy, or as a tenor in an opera.  He has almost counted his hairs; he certainly counts the winkings of his eyelids!  Can any detail be unimportant in an undertaking of such measureless risk?  It is no wonder, then, that a young man who is giving as much thought as this to a young, thoughtless girl is not worth much in his business for the time being!  In fact, it is a miracle to him, after

SOME DOOMFUL FROWN

from his queen, that he has survived the night and goes to his work at all!  He is confident that it is base habit.  “O, that this too too solid flesh would melt!” he cries, as his dissatisfied employer, or father, requires some reasonable action and fails to get it.  In after-life this same young man is glad the “grand passion” will never come to him again.  He feels that it has not heightened him in his own regard.  His love may have been smooth or it may have been swallowed in the quicksands of adversity—­the difference is small.  It is not creditable to the human brain to be so hoodwinked and purblind as Cupid makes his victims.  But

LOVE RULES THE UNIVERSE,

having its climax in God himself, and its earthly ideality in the mother’s affection.  We should not complain that when the potent essence is first administered to us it shakes us seriously.  Without this passion, selfishness would triumph, and man would not take on the cares of wedded life.  Society and religion would wither.  The world would be a howling den of chaos and deep crime.

HOW HAVE THE SAGES LOOKED UPON LOVE?

I think they are inclined to praise it, as a whole—­to indorse it merely as a sensation, a passing gratification.  It has always, on the contrary, seemed to me like an exquisitely painful means to an exquisitely beautiful end.  The warm genial love of the home—­the love which is as an open grate, cheerful, and which is without those thunderstorms needful to clear the heavily charged atmosphere of youthful love—­pleases and repays me for “the dangers I have passed.”  “The greatest pleasure of life is love,” says Sir William Temple.  “Love is like the hunter,” says Ralph Waldo Emerson, “who cares not for the game when once caught, which he may have pursued with the most intense and breathless eagerness.”  This is true of only a minority of the hunters.  I have more frequently bought additional fish than thrown away those I have caught.  Why?  Because the weariness and difficulty of catching two or three rock bass had impressed me with the value of a whole string of fish.  You have seen