Or perhaps she is under the fierce eye of some Cerberus of a schoolmistress, about whose grounds you prowl piteously, searching for small knot-holes in the surrounding board fence, through which little souvenirs of impassioned feeling may be thrust.  Sonnets are written for the town papers, full of telling phrases, and with classic allusions and foot-notes which draw attention to some similar felicity of expression in Horace or Ovid.  Correspondence may even be ventured on, enclosing locks of hair, and interchanging rings, and paper oaths of eternal fidelity.

But the old Cerberus is very wakeful:  the letters fail; the lamp that used to glimmer for a sign among the sycamores is gone out; a stolen wave of a handkerchief, a despairing look, and tears,—­which you fancy, but do not see,—­make you miserable for long days.

The tyrant teacher, with no trace of compassion in her withered heart, reports you to the college authorities.  There is a long lecture of admonition upon the folly of such dangerous practices; and if the offence be aggravated by some recent joviality with Dalton and the Senior, you are condemned to a month of exile with a country clergyman.  There are a few tearful regrets over the painful tone of the home letters; but the bracing country air, and the pretty faces of the village girls, heal your heart—­with fresh wounds.

The old Doctor sees dimly through his spectacles; and his pew gives a good look-out upon the smiling choir of singers.  A collegian wears the honors of a stranger, and the country bucks stand but poor chance in contrast with your wonderful attainments in cravats and verses.  But this fresh dream, odorous with its memories of sleigh-rides or lilac-blossoms, slips by, and yields again to the more ambitious dreams of the cloister.

In the prouder moments that come when you are more a man and less a boy,—­with more of strategy and less of faith,—­your thought of woman runs loftily; not loftily in the realm of virtue or goodness, but loftily on your new world-scale.  The pride of intellect, that is thirsting in you, fashions ideal graces after a classic model.  The heroines of fable are admired; and the soul is tortured with that intensity of passion which gleams through the broken utterances of Grecian tragedy.

In the vanity of self-consciousness one feels at a long remove above the ordinary love and trustfulness of a simple and pure heart.  You turn away from all such with a sigh of conceit, to graze on that lofty but bitter pasturage where no daisies grow.  Admiration may be called up by some graceful figure that you see moving under those sweeping elms; and you follow it with an intensity of look that makes you blush, and straightway hide the memory of the blush by summing up some artful sophistry, that resolves your delighted gaze into a weakness, and your contempt into a virtue.

But this cannot last.  As the years drop off, a certain pair of eyes beam one day upon you that seem to have been cut out of a page of Greek poetry.  They have all its sentiment, its fire, its intellectual reaches:  it would be hard to say what they have not.  The profile is a Greek profile, and the heavy chestnut hair is plaited in Greek bands.  The figure, too, might easily be that of Helen, or of Andromache.