The Atlantic Monthly | Page 4

tender hearts were pressed and saddened by fear. They are now set on fire by a sense of great redemption. They are prisoners pardoned.
For scholars the world is peopled only with saints, philosophers, and poets, and the studious boy seeks his own amid their large activity. So much of it meets his want, yet the whole does not meet all his want. He must combine and balance and embrace conflicting qualities. Every day his view enlarges. What was noble last year will now by no means content his conscience. Duty and beauty have risen.
The Ideal Tendency characterizes man, affords the only definition of him; and it is a perpetual, irresistible expansion. No matter on what it fastens, it will not stay, but spreads and soars like light in the morning sky.
To-day we are charmed with our partners, and think we can never tire of Alfred and Emily. To-morrow we discover without shame, after all our protestations and engagements, that their future seems incommensurate with our own. To our surprise, they also feel their paths diverging from ours. We part with a show of regret, but real joy to be free.
Both parties have gained from their intercourse a certainty of power and promise of greater power. Silly people fill the world with lamentation over human inconstancy; but if we follow love, we cannot cling to the beloved. We must love onward, and only when our friends go before us can we be true both to friendship and to them.
How eager and tremulous his excitement when at last the youth encounters all beauty in a maiden! Now he is on his trial. Can he move her? for he must be to her nothing or all. How stately and far-removed she seems in her crystal sphere! All her relations are fair and poetic. Her book is not like another book. Her soft and fragrant attire, can it be woven of ribbons and silk? She, too, has dreamed of the coming man, heroic, lyrical, impassioned; the beat of his blood a p?an and triumphal march; a man able to cut paths for her and lead her to all that is worthiest in life. Her day is an expectation; her demand looks out of proud eyes. Can he move this stately creature, pure and high above him as the clear moon yonder, never turning from her course,--this Diana, who will love upward and stoop to no Endymion? Now it will appear whether he can pass with another for all he is to himself. This will be the victory for which he was born, or blackest defeat. If she could love him! If he should, after all, be to her only such another as her cousin Thomas, who comes and goes with all his pretensions as unregarded as Rover the house-dog! Between these ifs he vacillates, swung like a ship on stormy waters, touching heaven and hell.
Meanwhile the maiden dares hardly look toward this generous new-comer, whose destiny lies broad open in his courage and desire. Others she could conciliate and gently allure, but she will not play with the lion. She will throw no web around his strength to tear her heart away, if it does not hold him. For the first time she guards her fancy. She will not think of the career that awaits him, of the help there is in him for men, and the honor that will follow him from them,--of the high studies, tasks, and companionship to which he is hastening. What avails this avoidance, this turning-away of the head? A fancy that must be kept is already lost. She read his quality in the first glance of deep-meaning eyes. When at last he speaks, she sees suddenly how beyond all recovery he had carried away her soul in that glance. They marry each the expectation of the other. It was a promise in either that shone so fair. Happy lovers, if only as wife and husband they can go on to fulfil the promise! For love cannot be repeated; every day it must have fresh food in a new object; and unless character is renewed, love must leave it behind and wander on.
If the wife is still aspiring,--if she lays growing demands on her hero,--if her thought enlarges and she stands true to it, separate from him in integrity as he saw her first, following not his, but her own native estimate,--she will always be his mistress. She will still have that charm of remoteness which belongs only to those who do not lean and borrow, to natures centred for themselves in the deep. There is something incalculable in such independence. It is full of surprise for the most intimate. In one breast the true wife prepares for her husband a course of loves. Every day she offers a