Silent looks, involuntary starts, things indicated, not
expressed, these are the most dangerous, the most seductive aliment of
thought to a delicate and sensitive nature. If things were said out,
they might not be said wisely,--they might repel by their freedom, or
disturb by their unfitness; but what is only looked is sent into the
soul through the imagination, which makes of it all that the ideal
faculties desire.
In a refined and exalted nature, it is very seldom that the feeling of
love, when once thoroughly aroused, bears any sort of relation to the
reality of the object. It is commonly an enkindling of the whole power
of the soul's love for whatever she considers highest and fairest; it
is, in fact, the love of something divine and unearthly, which, by a
sort of illusion, connects itself with a personality. Properly speaking,
there is but One true, eternal Object of all that the mind conceives, in
this trance of its exaltation. Disenchantment must come, of course; and
in a love which terminates in happy marriage, there is a tender and
gracious process, by which, without shock or violence, the ideal is
gradually sunk in the real, which, though found faulty and earthly, is
still ever tenderly remembered as it seemed under the morning light of
that enchantment.
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