ballad queen, nor the shoemaker down yonder, whose respirations are
getting shorter and shorter, touches them in the least. They are merry
and happy, and the gray-beard turret has not the heart to thrust a
foolish moral upon them. They would not thank him if he did, I dare
say. Perhaps they could not understand him. Time enough! Twenty
years hence they will be able to sit down at his feet, and count griefs
with him, and tell him tale for tale. Human hearts get ruinous in so
much less time than stone walls and towers. See, the young man has
thrown himself down at the girl's feet on a little space of grass. In
her scarlet cloak she looks like a blossom springing out of a crevice
on the ruined steps. He gives her a flower, and she bows her face down
over it almost to her knees. What did the flower say? Is it to hide a
blush? He looks delighted; and I almost fancy I see a proud colour on
his brow. As I gaze, these young people make for me a perfect idyl.
The generous, ungrudging sun, the melancholy ruin, decked, like mad
Lear, with the flowers and ivies of forgetfulness and grief, and
between them, sweet and evanescent, human truth and love!

Love!--does it yet walk the world, or is it imprisoned in poems and
romances? Has not the circulating library become the sole home of the
passion? Is love not become the exclusive property of novelists and
playwrights, to be used by them only for professional purposes?
Surely, if the men I see are lovers, or ever have been lovers, they
would be nobler than they are. The knowledge that he is beloved
should--_must_ make a man tender, gentle, upright, pure. While yet a
youngster in a jacket, I can remember falling desperately in love with
a young lady several years my senior,--after the fashion of youngsters
in jackets. Could I have fibbed in these days? Could I have betrayed
a comrade? Could I have stolen eggs or callow young from the nest?
Could I have stood quietly by and seen the weak or the maimed bullied?