The perusal of this poetry, and his conversation with the poet, threw
Maltravers into a fit of deep musing. "This poor Cesarini may warn me
against myself!" thought he. "Better hew wood and draw water than
attach ourselves devotedly to an art in which we have not the capacity
to excel. . . . It is to throw away the healthful objects of life for a
diseased dream,--worse than the Rosicrucians, it is to make a sacrifice
of all human beauty for the smile of a sylphid that never visits us but
in visions." Maltravers looked over his own compositions, and thrust
them into the fire. He slept ill that night. His pride was a little
dejected. He was like a beauty who has seen a caricature of herself.



CHAPTER III.

"Still follow SENSE, of every art the Soul."
POPE: /Moral Essays/--Essay iv.

ERNEST MALTRAVERS spent much of his time with the family of De
Montaigne. There is no period of life in which we are more accessible
to the sentiment of friendship than in the intervals of moral exhaustion
which succeed to the disappointments of the passions. There is, then,
something inviting in those gentler feelings which keep alive, but do
not fever, the circulation of the affections. Maltravers looked with
the benevolence of a brother upon the brilliant, versatile, and restless
Teresa. She was the last person in the world he could have been in love
with--for his nature, ardent, excitable, yet fastidious, required
something of repose in the manners and temperament of the woman whom he
could love, and Teresa scarcely knew what repose was. Whether playing
with her children (and she had two lovely ones--the eldest six years