A woman does not
bend and form herself in a day to the caprices of passion. The
pleasure of loving, like some rare flower, needs the most careful
ingenuity of culture. Time alone, and two souls attuned each to each,
can discover all its resources, and call into being all the tender and
delicate delights for which we are steeped in a thousand
superstitions, imagining them to be inherent in the heart that
lavishes them upon us. It is this wonderful response of one nature to
another, this religious belief, this certainty of finding peculiar or
excessive happiness in the presence of one we love, that accounts in
part for perdurable attachments and long-lived passion. If a woman
possesses the genius of her sex, love never comes to be a matter of
use and wont. She brings all her heart and brain to love, clothes her
tenderness in forms so varied, there is such art in her most natural
moments, or so much nature in her art, that in absence her memory is
almost as potent as her presence. All other women are as shadows
compared with her. Not until we have lost or known the dread of losing
a love so vast and glorious, do we prize it at its just worth. And if
a man who has once possessed this love shuts himself out from it by
his own act and deed, and sinks to some loveless marriage; if by some
incident, hidden in the obscurity of married life, the woman with whom
he hoped to know the same felicity makes it clear that it will never
be revived for him; if, with the sweetness of divine love still on his
lips, he has dealt a deadly wound to /her/, his wife in truth, whom he
forsook for a social chimera,--then he must either die or take refuge
in a materialistic, selfish, and heartless philosophy, from which
impassioned souls shrink in horror.
Pages:
56
57
58
59
60
61
62
63
64
65
66
67
68
69
70
71
72
73
74
75
76
77
78
79
80