tells Mrs. Nisbet, "is the great business of a sea officer,--all
private considerations must give way to it, however painful it is;"
but he owns he wishes "the American vessels at the Devil, and the
whole continent of America to boot," because they detain him from her
side.

There is no singularity in the experience that obstacles tend rather
to inflame than to check a lover's eagerness. What is noteworthy in
Nelson's letters at this time is the utter absence of any illusions,
of any tendency to exaggerate and glorify the qualities of the woman
who for the nonce possessed his heart. There is not a sign of the
perturbation of feeling, of the stirring of the soul, that was
afterwards so painfully elicited by another influence. "The dear
object," he writes to his brother, "you must like. Her sense, polite
manners, and, to you I may say, beauty, you will much admire. She
possesses sense far superior to half the people of our acquaintance,
and her manners are Mrs. Moutray's." The same calm, measured tone
pervades all his mention of her to others. His letters to herself, on
the other hand, are often pleasing in the quiet, simple, and generally
unaffected tenderness which inspires them. In a more ordinary man,
destined to more commonplace fortunes, they might well be regarded as
promising that enduring wedded love which strikes root downward and
bears fruit upward, steadily growing in depth and devotion as the
years roll by. But Nelson was not an ordinary man, and from that more
humble happiness a childless marriage further debarred him. He could
rise far higher, and, alas! descend far lower as he followed the
radiant vision,--the image of his own mind rather than an external
reality,--the ideal, which, whether in fame or in love, beckoned him
onward. The calm, even, and wholly matter-of-fact appreciation of his
wife's estimable traits can now be seen in the light of his after