know all about it now, and am content. But I wish that some learned
pundit would give us a good definition of romance, would describe in
words that feeling with which our hearts are so pestered when we are
young, which makes us sigh for we know not what, and forbids us to be
contented with what God sends us. We invest female beauty with
impossible attributes, and are angry because our women have not the
spiritualised souls of angels, anxious as we are that they should
also be human in the flesh. A man looks at her he would love as at a
distant landscape in a mountainous land. The peaks are glorious with
more than the beauty of earth and rock and vegetation. He dreams of
some mysterious grandeur of design which tempts him on under the hot
sun, and over the sharp rock, till he has reached the mountain goal
which he had set before him. But when there, he finds that the
beauty is well-nigh gone, and as for that delicious mystery on which
his soul had fed, it has vanished for ever.

I know all about it now, and am, as I said, content. Beneath those
deep black eyes there lay a well of love, good, honest, homely love,
love of father and husband and children that were to come--of that
love which loves to see the loved ones prospering in honesty. That
noble brow--for it is noble; I am unchanged in that opinion, and will
go unchanged to my grave--covers thoughts as to the welfare of many,
and an intellect fitted to the management of a household, of
servants, namely, and children, and perchance a husband. That mouth
can speak words of wisdom, of very useful wisdom--though of poetry it
has latterly uttered little that was original. Poetry and romance!
They are splendid mountain views seen in the distance. So let men be
content to see them, and not attempt to tread upon the fallacious
heather of the mystic hills.