We have all felt this. Nothing can more annoy the soul of taste or
sensibility than to behold its favorite scene and subject fail in
awakening others to that emotion which it has inspired in ourselves.
We turn away in haste, lest the object of our worship should become
degraded by a longer survey. Enthusiasm recoils at a denial of
sympathy; and all the worth of our companion, in a thousand other
respects, fails to reconcile us to his coldness and indifference.

That Alfred Stevens had taste and talent--that he was well read
in the volumes which had been her favorite study, Margaret Cooper
needed no long time to discover. She soon ascribed to him qualities
and tastes which were beyond his nature. Deceived by his tact, she
believed in his enthusiasm. He soon discovered HER tastes; and she
found equally soon that HIS were like her own. After this discovery,
she gave him credit for other and more important possessions; and
little dreamed that, while he responded to her glowing sentiments
with others equally glowing--avowed the same love for the same
authors, and concurred with her in the preference of the same
passages--his feelings were as little susceptible of sympathy with
hers as would have been those of the cold demon Mephistopheles!
While her eye was flashing, her cheek flushed, her breast heaving
with the burning thoughts and strains of the master to whom her
beautiful lips were giving utterance, he was simply sensible to HER
beauty--to its strange, wild charms--and meditating thoughts from
which the soul of true poetry recoils with the last feelings of
aversion. Even the passion which he felt while he surveyed her,
foreign as it was to those legitimate emotions which her ambition
and her genius would equally have tended to inspire in any
justly-minded nature, might well be considered frigid--regarded as