thanked his fortune that he had to treat with parents. The consolatory
sensation of a pure intent soothed his inherent wildness, in the
contemplation of the possibility that the latter might be roused by those
people, her parents, to upset his honourable ambition to win a wife after
the fashion of orderly citizens. It would be on their heads! But why
vision mischance? An old half-jesting prophecy of his among his friends,
that he would not pass his fortieth year, rose upon his recollection
without casting a shadow. Lo, the reckless prophet about to marry!

No dark bride, no skeleton, no colourless thing, no lichened tree, was
she. Not Death, my friends, but Life, is the bride of this doomed
fortieth year! Was animation ever vivider in contrast with obstruction?
Her hair would kindle the frosty shades to a throb of vitality: it would
be sunshine in the subterranean sphere. The very thinking of her
dispersed that realm of the poison hue, and the eternally inviting
phosphorescent, still, curved forefinger, which says, 'Come.'

To think of her as his vernal bride, while the snowy Alps were a
celestial garden of no sunset before his eyes, was to have the taste of
mortal life in the highest. He wondered how it was that he could have
waited so long for her since the first night of their meeting, and he
just distinguished the fact that he lived with the pulses of the minutes,
much as she did, only more fierily. The ceaseless warfare called
politics must have been the distraction: he forgot any other of another
kind. He was a bridegroom for whom the rosed Alps rolled out, a panorama
of illimitable felicity. And there were certain things he must overcome
before he could name his bride his own, so that his innate love of
contention, which had been constantly flattered by triumph, brought, his
whole nature into play with the prospect of the morrow: not much liking
it either. There is a nerve, in brave warriors that does not like the