orted by me, not I by her."

Rudolph is another of the _habitues_ of our chimney-corner, representing
the order of young knighthood in America, and his dreams and fancies, if
impracticable, are always of a kind to make every one think him a good
fellow. He who has no romantic dreams at twenty-one will be a horribly
dry peascod at fifty; therefore it is that I gaze reverently at all
Rudolph's chateaus in Spain, which want nothing to complete them except
solid earth to stand on.

"And pray," said Theophilus, "how long will it take a young lawyer or
physician, starting with no heritage but his own brain, to create a
sphere of poetry and beauty in which to keep his goddess? How much a
year will be necessary, as the English say, to _do_ this garden of Eden,
whereinto shall enter only the poetry of life?"

"I don't know. I haven't seen it near enough to consider. It is because
I know the difficulty of its attainment that I have no present thoughts
of marriage. Marriage is to me in the bluest of all blue distances,--far
off, mysterious, and dreamy as the Mountains of the Moon or sources of
the Nile. It shall come only when I have secured a fortune that shall
place my wife above all necessity of work or care."

"I desire to hear from you," said Theophilus, "when you have found the
sum that will keep a woman from care. I know of women now inhabiting
palaces, waited on at every turn by servants, with carriages, horses,
jewels, laces, cashmeres, enough for princesses, who are eaten up by
care. One lies awake all night on account of a wrinkle in the waist of
her dress; another is dying because no silk of a certain inexpressible
shade is to be found in New York; a third has had a dress sent home,
which has proved such a failure that life seems no longer worth having.
If it were not for the consolations of religion, one doesn't know what
would become of her. The fact is, that care and labor are as much
correlated to human existence as shadow is to light; there is no such
thing as excluding them from any mortal lot. You may make a canary-bird
or a gold-fish live in absolute contentment without a care or labor, but
a human being you cannot. Human beings are restless and active in their
very nature, and will do something, and that something will prove a
care, a labor, and a fatigue, arrange it how you will. As long as there
is anything to be desired and not yet attained, so long its attainment
will be attempted; so long as that attai