this reason in a narrative which records at the same time that he held himself in the most real sense, worthy of Désirée. Indeed this common paradox of love, mutual confessed unworthiness, was at no time urged between two souls, who knew each other and each other's love of the directest truth, too well to think such profession needful to strengthen compliment, or to account for defeat.

Nor, on the other hand, was there any shadow of comfort in that other suggestion of the distracted heart suggestion rejected almost when conceived, that this long affection had been misplaced on one who could not return it. Had she been fickle, I could have said, such is woman's nature; base, I could have buried personal pain in pain for her. But that curse, bitterer than the frenzy of love, which the disheartened poet in his sad irony proclaims the true, the inevitable close of passion, when charm by charm un'winds which robed our idols', whether in the mercy or the further wrath of Providence, was not reserved for me. Even now, inexperienced in the unwavering affection by which Désirée, through many later years, was destined in some degree to console the desire thus made more desiring, I knew but too well that here, at least, had been no selfdeception. To have believed her in the faintest degree unequal to such return had she found me worthier, would have been, in truth, to destroy for myself the very power of believing. If there were one thing sure on this wandering and changeful earth, it was this fair creature's noble nature. Nay, there seemed a secret selfishnesssomething not knightly and heroic in any consideration of this character. As a great teacher said of true love towards God, was not mine also to be given for love's own sake, and without thought of return? What bond had I thus on Désirée ? And yet

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VII In the silences of the night, during wakefulness, so rare and prized in youth when I could lie still with a thousand thoughts of Désirée, this warfare now raged within my soul, and I strove against self in the madness of the moment. There is some truth, I cried, in the conventional phrases we find in real and imaginary narratives: ungrateful, cold, cruel-hearted: some possibility in what books teach, the transference of passion to another, some happiness surely in the after-love which (the experienced assure us) most men find refuge in for life— some folly at least in an eternity of unrewarded persistence. Weak heart, surrender this idle longing; unfix affection from a thing so far above; manfully resign the unattainable; seek consolation elsewhere; love her less. . . . O voice of little faith and faint-heartedness! counsels of cowardice disguised in worldly wisdom! O if an angel had spoken thus from heaven, I could not have prized her less utterly: this one answer was all-sufficient; Désirée's inseparable dearness.

Fatal intimacy supplied many remembrances, some already recorded, each enough to justify an affection for which one life, prolonged even to patriarchal limits, would have furnished, I thought, an inadequate extension. At this time, walking alone at midnight over level sea sands, where the waves in their relapse left a momentary mirror starred with blue phosphoric spangles or glistening with an uncertain and ghostly moonlight, I reviewed often the years of desire, not only in the great periods of crisis, La Collina or the Moselle-side ascent, but in their lesser and even more pathetic interspaces. There, successive proofs of Désirée's sisterly and unforethoughtful affection-gifts given without significance, or reproofs without fear, pleasures shared till pleasure, humiliated at its own

sweetness, passed into pure heart-thankfulness; or, dearer still, assistance sought in her perplexity, confidence reposed in sorrow (the touch of Nature beyond all others affecting), had each in turn raised Love through so many thousand gradations, that the series of his possible ascension appeared of more than stellar infinity. Men who have forgotten, or never felt, tell us of the consolations of Nature, the excellent lessons of her teaching: but what relief could it be, set against this endless exile from the only love, if, indeed the stars in the poet's phrase, were 'going lightly with their golden feet over heaven, fearing 'to awaken earth', if ocean murmured peace?

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Rather, there was something fearful-a stroke of superhuman irony, in the calm I could not share, and the power which could not save me. For with these remembrances came the further conviction, how vast the loss, how cruel and unmitigated the punishment. It seemed I was living a posthumous existence-a buried and phantomatic life, where the constellations above me were the ghastly wisps and exhalations hung from the roof of some charnel-vault, and the moon a white face of mockery-the arch of heaven, from horizon to zenith, did not appear a sepulchre too large for such a sorrow. And then, whilst spectral voices were calling the Lost! Lost! I heard, perhaps, the measured pulse' of shoreward oars, and the sailors' animated Oi-oi cry.-I was in presence of the stern activity of life; I felt the strange compassion some readers will have probably experienced for personal calamity, an almost fierce and passionate regret for my own ruined early energy, for the youth I remembered as half divine; for the manly hopes and

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wholesome aspirations once centred on an aim so true and high, that every other earthly pursuit, compared with this, seemed aimless. I could have wept for pity for the lost self, hardly less than for the lost Herzallerliebste.

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VIII But vivendum dum vivendum. Divine dawning follows the night of the longest wakefulness: Aurora, who now in place of her natural brightness and comfort, brought the immediate sense of central disquiet, of the vacant yearning, the advent of the days which, in the Preacher's pathetic phrase, have no pleasure in them'. That sad experience has been mine since almost uninterruptedly,— early, to wish it late, and late, that it might be early no more; to ask at rising how I should this day confront again and endure the weight of human hours'; to find at evening that the day had passed, sustained by secret unavowed hope for what could have no accomplishment. Yet if I felt this calamity like a man, it was a duty recognized at once, to bear it manfully; to accept the burden resignedly indeed, but without the selfish hypocrisy of feigned acquiescence, confessing the aim of life lost without compensation, but determined to do the work of life still; if conquered, yet by aid of what resistance I could gather up, undefeated. One of the very few points on which (my trust was) I might not unjustly rank myself with Désirée, was love of truth, and hence aversion from sentimentalism; that enervation at least I would not add to the sickheartedness of sorrow, or refuse any possible comfort. Ideal aspirations, practical duty, the lessons of nature and of study, these, while so much had been taken, appeared much abiding until years had passed could I detect the latent hope which underlay and animated all? or know that when Hope died, these also, falling into sepulchral darkness, would part with every trace of consola

tion books, life, and nature alike vanity, the diversions of pleasure, and the rewards of conscience'? Reserving for later record the larger lessons of sorrow, I shall add here only, in final reference to my own special sphere of life, that I now entered and without interruption pursued a profession of practical, often of immediate and sensible, usefulness; not over-monotonous, or over-varied; and leaving intervals for many distant wanderings, which however were not, like two former journeys already noticed, equilinear with that pilgrimage through the world within the heart which I have beguiled some hours by recording.

IX Désirée's return to London, the central scene of these events, had meanwhile added an active perplexity to the toilsome reconstruction of existence from ruin. When first now I saw the windows of that familiar house ruddy in a winter's twilight, it was as if the ghost of the buried life had appeared with a false glow of former happiness, a smile of transcending mockery. I strove hard to confirm myself in the conviction that the sentence was irrevocable, Anteros lord of the ascendant. Désirée will look with indifference, I said, on the desolation her coldness has wrought. Was it not wisdom, was it not duty, was it not justice to self, to refrain from seeing her? . . . As I thought thus, or tried to think, I had seen her already. We had parted last with smiles and waving hands; but ah! moment of suppressed sighs, of glances which in that moment exchanged the lesson of life, of thoughts too sad for tears, when a door opened, and suddenly we were face to face. Passion and Poetry have celebrated often the solemn sorrow of utter farewells; but are there not meetings even more poignantly cruel? When during youth, in street or company, I had chanced on the fair child, often, * to borrow the Homeric phrase painting that sudden influx

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