means rather of promoting than marring human happiness,
should leave on the heart so little vestige of those
impressions which characterize the fervency of youth;
and which, dispassionately considered, constitute
the only true felicity of riper life! It is then
that man, in all the vigour and capacity of his intellectual
nature, feels the sentiment of love upon him in all
its ennobling force. It is then that his impetuous
feelings, untinged by the romance which imposes its
check upon the more youthful, like the wild flow of
the mighty torrent, seeks a channel wherein they may
empty themselves; and were he to follow the guidance
of those feelings, of which in that riper life he
seems ashamed as of a weakness unworthy his sex, in
the warm and glowing bosom of Nature’s divinity—
woman—would he pour forth the swollen
tide of his affection; and acknowledge, in the fullness
of his expanding heart, the vast bounty of Providence,
who had bestowed on him so invaluable—so
unspeakably invaluable, a blessing.—But
no; in the pursuit of ambition, in the acquisition
of wealth, in the thirst after power, and the craving
after distinction, nay, nineteen times out of twenty,
in the most frivolous occupations, the most unsatisfactory
amusements, do the great mass of the maturer man sink
those feelings; divested of which, we become mere
plodders on the earth, mere creatures of materialism:
nor is it until after age and infirmity have overtaken
them, they look back with regret to that real and
substantial, but unenjoyed happiness, which the occupied
heart and the soul’s communion alone can bestow.
Then indeed, when too late, are they ready to acknowledge
the futility of those pursuits, the inadequacy of those
mere ephemeral pleasures, to which in the full meridian
of their manhood they sacrificed, as a thing unworthy
of their dignity, the mysterious charm of woman’s
influence and woman’s beauty.
We do not mean to say Clara de Haldimar would have
fallen short of the high estimate formed of her worth
by the friend of her brother; neither is it to be
understood, Sir Everard suffered this fair vision
of his fancy to lead him into the wild and labyrinthian
paths of boyish romance; but certain it is, the floating
illusions, conjured up by his imagination, exercised
a mysterious influence over his heart, that hourly
acquired a deeper and less equivocal character.
It might have been curiosity in the first instance,
or that mere repose of the fancy upon an object of
its own creation, which was natural to a young man
placed like himself for the moment out of the pale
of all female society. It has been remarked,
and justly, there is nothing so dangerous to the peace
of the human heart as solitude. It is in solitude,
our thoughts, taking their colouring from our feelings,
invest themselves with the power of multiplying ideal
beauty, until we become in a measure tenants of a
world of our own creation, from which we never descend,
without loathing and disgust, into the dull and matter-of-fact
routine of actual existence. Hence the misery
of the imaginative man!—hence his little
sympathy with the mass, who, tame and soulless, look
upon life and the things of life, not through the
refining medium of ideality, but through the grossly
magnifying optics of mere sense and materialism.