noblest attribute, Ambition."

HELEN.--"No ambition!"

HARLEY.--"It is vanity that stirs the poet to toil,--if toil the wayward
chase of his own chimeras can be called. Ambition is a more masculine
passion."

Helen shook her head gently, but made no answer.

HARLEY.--"If I utter a word that profanes one of your delusions, you
shake your head and are incredulous. Pause: listen one moment to my
counsels,--perhaps the last I may ever obtrude upon you. Lift your eyes;
look around. Far as your eye can reach, nay, far beyond the line which
the horizon forms in the landscape, stretch the lands of my inheritance.
Yonder you see the home in which my forefathers for many generations
lived with honour, and died lamented. All these, in the course of
nature, might one day have been your own, had you not rejected my
proposals. I offered you, it is true, not what is commonly called Love;
I offered you sincere esteem, and affections the more durable for their
calm. You have not been reared by the world in the low idolatry of rank
and wealth; but even romance cannot despise the power of serving others,
which rank and wealth bestow. For myself, hitherto indolence, and lately
disdain, rob fortune of these nobler attributes. But she who will share
my fortune may dispense it so as to atone for my sins of omission.
On the other side, grant that there is no bar to your preference for
Leonard Fairfield, what does your choice present to you? Those of his
kindred with whom you will associate are unrefined and mean. His sole
income is derived from precarious labours; the most vulgar of all
anxieties--the fear of bread itself for the morrow--must mingle with
all your romance, and soon steal from love all its poetry. You think his
affection will console you for every sacrifice. Folly! the love of poets
is for a mist, a moonbeam, a denizen of air, a phantom that they call
an Ideal. They suppose for a moment that they have found that Ideal in
Chloe or Phyllis, Helen or a milkmaid. Bah! the first time you come to
the poet with the baker's bill, where flies the Ideal? I knew one more
brilliant than Leonard, more exquisitely gifted by nature; that one
was a woman; she saw a man hard and cold as that stone at your feet,--a
false, hollow, sordid worldling; she made him her idol, beheld in him
all that history would not recognize in a Caesar, that mythology would
scarcely grant to an Apollo: to him she was the plaything of an hour;
she died, and before