terribly.

I was a man of middle age, and had called myself a scientist and
philosopher. I had thought, if ever, to love soberly and
philosophically. Instead of that I loved as poets sing, as artists
paint, as the statues look, as the great romances read, as ideals
teach,--as the young love.

As the young do? Nay. What young creature ever loved like that?

They know not love who sip it at the spring.
Youth is a fragile child that plays at love,
Tosses a shell, and trims a little sail,
Mimics the passion of the gathered years,
And is a loiterer on the shallow bank
Of the great flood that we have waited for.

I do not think of any other thing which a man cannot do better at
forty, than at twenty. Why, then, should he not the better love?

My lady had a stately soul; but she gave it sweet graciousness and
little womanly appeals and curves, that were to my heart as the touch
of her hand was to my pulse. I was so happy in her presence that I
could not believe I had ever been sad; and I longed so for her in
absence that I could scarcely believe I had become happy. She was to
my thoughts as the light is to the crystal. She came into my life as
the miracles came to the unbelieving. She moved through my days and
through my dreams, as the rose-cloud moved upon the mountain sky. She
floated between me and my sick. She hovered above me and my dying.
She was a mist between me and my books. Once when I took the knife for
a dangerous operation, the steel blade caught a sunbeam and flashed;
and I looked at the flash--it seemed to contain a new world--and I
thought: "She is my own. I am a happy man!" But I was sorry for my
patient. I was not rough with him. And the operation succeeded.

What is to be said? I loved her. Love is like faith. He who has it
understands before you speak. But to him who has it not, it cannot be
explained.

A year from the time of my most blessed accident beside the
trout-brook,--in one year and two months from that day, upon a warm and
wonderful September afternoon, my lady and I were married, and I
brought her from her mother's house to the mountain village where first
we saw each other. There we spent the first week of our happiness. It
was as near to Eden as we could find. The village was left almost to
its own rare resources; the summer tourists were well-nigh gone; the
peaceful roads gave no stare of intrusion to our joy. The hills looked
down upon us and