marvels, when one considers what one is now, how it could have ever
been! That love /of ours/ was never made for after years! It could
never have flowed into the common and cold channel of ordinary affairs!
It could never have been mingled with the petty cares and the low
objects with which the loves of all who live long together in this
sordid and most earthly earth are sooner or later blended! We could not
have spared to others an atom of the great wealth of our affection. We
were misers of every coin in that boundless treasury. It would have
pierced me to the soul to have seen Isora smile upon another. I know
not even, had we had children, if I should not have been jealous of my
child! Was this selfish love? yes, it was, intensely, wholly selfish;
but it was a love made so only by its excess; nothing selfish on a
smaller scale polluted it. There was not on earth that which the one
would not have forfeited at the lightest desire of the other. So
utterly were happiness and Isora entwined together that I could form no
idea of the one with which the other was not connected. Was this love
made for the many and miry roads through which man must travel? Was it
made for age, or, worse than age, for those cool, ambitious, scheming
years that we call mature, in which all the luxuriance and verdure of
things are pared into tame shapes that mimic life, but a life that is
estranged from Nature, in which art is the only beauty and regularity
the only grace? No, in my heart of hearts, I feel that our love was not
meant for the stages of life through which I have already passed; it
would have made us miserable to see it fritter itself away, and to
remember what it once was. Better as it is! better to mourn over the
green bough than to look upon the sapless stem. You who now glance over
these pages, are you a mother? If so, answer me one question: Would you
not rather that the child whom you have cherished with your soul's care,
whom you have nurtured at your bosom, whose young joys your eyes have
sparkled to behold, whose lightest grief you have wept to witness as you