before,
what would she be now, deprived of the society of the only being to whom
she could unfold the spiritual mysteries of her romantic soul? Was such
a character to be left alone in this world of slang and scrip; of coarse
motives and coarser words? Then, too, she was so intelligent and so
gentle; the only person who understood him, and never grated for an
instant on his high ideal. Her temper also was the sweetest in the
world, eminent as her generous spirit. She spoke of others with so much
kindness, and never indulged in that spirit of detraction or that love
of personal gossip which Tancred had frankly told her he abhorred.
Somehow or other it seemed that their tastes agreed on everything.

The agitated Tancred rose from the bed where the hope of slumber was
vain. The fire in his dressing-room was nearly extinguished; wrapped in
his chamber robe, he threw himself into a chair, which he drew near the
expiring embers, and sighed.

Unhappy youth! For you commences that great hallucination, which all
must prove, but which fortunately can never be repeated, and which,
in mockery, we call first love. The physical frame has its infantile
disorders; the cough which it must not escape, the burning skin which it
must encounter. The heart has also its childish and cradle malady, which
may be fatal, but which, if once surmounted, enables the patient to meet
with becoming power all the real convulsions and fevers of passion that
are the heirloom of our after-life. They, too, may bring destruction;
but, in their case, the cause and the effect are more proportioned.
The heroine is real, the sympathy is wild but at least genuine, the
catastrophe is that of a ship at sea which sinks with a rich cargo in a
noble venture.

In our relations with the softer sex it cannot be maintained that
ignorance is bliss. On the contrary, experience is the best security
for enduring love. Love at first sight is often a genial and genuine
sentiment, but first love at first sight is ever eventually branded as
spurious. Still more so is that first love which suffuses less rapidly
the spirit of the ecstatic votary, when he finds that by degrees his
feelings, as the phrase runs, have become engaged. Fondness is so new
to him that he has repaid it with exaggerated idolatry, and become
intoxicated by the novel gratification of his vanity. Little does he
suspect that all this time his seventh heaven is but the crapulence
of self-love. In these cases,