hin
was not comparable to that of Constance. The fact was, that the broad
and common emotions of the intellectual character struck upon the
right key. Courage, defiance, ambition, these she comprehended to their
fullest extent; but the rich subtleties of thought which mark the cold
and bright page of the Comus; the noble Platonism--the high and rare
love for what is abstractedly good, these were not "sonorous and
trumpet-speaking" enough for the heart of one meant by Nature for a
heroine or a queen, not a poetess or a philosopher.

But all that in literature was delicate, and half-seen, and abstruse,
had its peculiar charm for Godolphin. Of a reflective and refining
mind, he had early learned to despise the common emotions of men: glory
touched him not, and to ambition he had shut his heart. Love, with
him--even though he had been deemed, not unjustly, a man of gallantry
and pleasure--love was not compounded of the ordinary elements of the
passions. Full of dreams, and refinements, and intense abstractions, it
was a love that seemed not homely enough for endurance, and of too rare
a nature to hope for sympathy in return.

And so it was in his intercourse with Constance, both were continually
disappointed. "You do not feel this," said Constance. "She cannot
understand me," sighed Godolphin.

But we must not suppose--despite his refinements, and his reveries,
and his love for the intellectual and the pure--that Godolphin was of a
stainless character or mind. He was one who, naturally full of decided
and marked qualities, was, by the peculiar elements of our society,
rendered a doubtful, motley, and indistinct character, tinctured by the
frailties that leave us in a wavering state between vice and virtue.
The energies that had marked his boyhood were dulled and crippled in
the indolent life of the world. His wandering habits for the last few
years--the soft and poetical existence of the South--had fed his
natural romance, and nourished that passion for contemplation which
the intellectual man of pleasure so commonly forms; for pleasure has
a philosophy of its own--a sad, a fanciful, yet deep persuasion of the
vanity of all things--a craving after the bright ideal--

"The desire of the moth for the star."

Solomon's thirst for pleasure was the companion of his wisdom: satiety
was the offspring of the one--discontent of the other. But this
philosophy, though seductive, is of no wholesome nor useful character;
it is