awakening passion; desires to
punish for the pleasure of forgiving, to withdraw for the joy of being
recalled; a wild elated drama in which the whole world recedes into
the background, and all life is merged for the lover in the
half-sweet, half-fearful consciousness of one other soul,

Whose lightest whisper moves him more
Than all the ranged reasons of the world.

And in this mood it is curious to note how inadequate common speech
and ordinary language appear, to meet the needs of expression. Even
young people with no literary turn, no gift of style, find their
memory supplying for them all sorts of broken echoes and rhetorical
phrases, picked out of half-forgotten romances; speech must be
_soigneux_ now, must be dignified, to meet so uplifting an experience.
How oddly like a book the young lover talks, using so naturally the
loud inflated phrases that seem so divorced from common-sense and
experience! How common it is to see in law-reports, in cases which
deal with broken engagements of marriage, to find in the excited
letters which are read and quoted an irresistible tendency to drop
into doggerel verse! It all seems to the sane reader such a grotesque
kind of intoxication. Yet it is as natural as the airs and graces of
the singing canary, the unfurling of the peacock's fan, the held
breath and hampered strut of the turkey--a tendency to assume a
greatness and a nobility that one does not possess, to seem
impressive, tremendous, desirable. Ordinary talk will not do; it must
rhyme, it must march, it must glitter, it must be stuck full of gems;
accomplishments must be paraded, powers must be hinted at. The victor
must advance to triumph with blown trumpets and beaten drums; and in
solitude there must follow the reaction of despair, the fear that one
has disgraced oneself, seemed clumsy and dull, done ignobly. Every
sensitive emotion is awake; and even the most serene and modest
natures, in the grip of passion, can become suspicious and
self-absorbed, because the passion which consumes them is so fierce
that it shrivels all social restraints, and leaves the soul naked, and
bent upon the most uncontrolled self-emphasis.

But apart from this urgent passion, there are many quieter ways in
which the same spirit, the same emotion, which is nothing but a sense
of self-significance, comes into the soul. Some are so inspired by
music, the combinations of melodies, the intricate conspiracy of
chords and ordered vibr