Hath she her faults?
I would you had them too.
They are the fruity must of
soundest wine;
Or say, they are regenerating
fire
Such as hath turned the dense
black element
Into a crystal pathway for
the sun.
If youth is the season of hope, it is often so only
in the sense that our elders are hopeful about us;
for no age is so apt as youth to think its emotions,
partings, and resolves are the last of their kind.
Each crisis seems final, simply because it is new.
We are told that the oldest inhabitants in Peru do
not cease to be agitated by the earthquakes, but they
probably see beyond each shock, and reflect that there
are plenty more to come.
To Dorothea, still in that time of youth when the
eyes with their long full lashes look out after their
rain of tears unsoiled and unwearied as a freshly
opened passion-flower, that morning’s parting
with Will Ladislaw seemed to be the close of their
personal relations. He was going away into the
distance of unknown years, and if ever he came back
he would be another man. The actual state of
his mind— his proud resolve to give the
lie beforehand to any suspicion that he would play
the needy adventurer seeking a rich woman—
lay quite out of her imagination, and she had interpreted
all his behavior easily enough by her supposition
that Mr. Casaubon’s codicil seemed to him, as
it did to her, a gross and cruel interdict on any
active friendship between them. Their young delight
in speaking to each other, and saying what no one
else would care to hear, was forever ended, and become
a treasure of the past. For this very reason
she dwelt on it without inward check. That unique
happiness too was dead, and in its shadowed silent
chamber she might vent the passionate grief which
she herself wondered at. For the first time she
took down the miniature from the wall and kept it
before her, liking to blend the woman who had been
too hardly judged with the grandson whom her own heart
and judgment defended. Can any one who has rejoiced
in woman’s tenderness think it a reproach to
her that she took the little oval picture in her palm
and made a bed for it there, and leaned her cheek
upon it, as if that would soothe the creatures who
had suffered unjust condemnation? She did not
know then that it was Love who had come to her briefly,
as in a dream before awaking, with the hues of morning
on his wings— that it was Love to whom
she was sobbing her farewell as his image was banished
by the blameless rigor of irresistible day. She
only felt that there was something irrevocably amiss
and lost in her lot, and her thoughts about the future
were the more readily shapen into resolve. Ardent
souls, ready to construct their coming lives, are
apt to commit themselves to the fulfilment of their
own visions.
