e, we cannot cling to the
beloved. We must love onward, and only when our friends go before us can
we be true both to friendship and to them.

How eager and tremulous his excitement when at last the youth encounters
all beauty in a maiden! Now he is on his trial. Can he move her? for he
must be to her nothing or all. How stately and far-removed she seems in
her crystal sphere! All her relations are fair and poetic. Her book is
not like another book. Her soft and fragrant attire, can it be woven of
ribbons and silk? She, too, has dreamed of the coming man, heroic,
lyrical, impassioned; the beat of his blood a paean and triumphal march;
a man able to cut paths for her and lead her to all that is worthiest in
life. Her day is an expectation; her demand looks out of proud eyes.
Can he move this stately creature, pure and high above him as the clear
moon yonder, never turning from her course,--this Diana, who will love
upward and stoop to no Endymion? Now it will appear whether he can pass
with another for all he is to himself. This will be the victory for
which he was born, or blackest defeat. If she could love him! If he
should, after all, be to her only such another as her cousin Thomas, who
comes and goes with all his pretensions as unregarded as Rover the
house-dog! Between these _ifs_ he vacillates, swung like a ship on
stormy waters, touching heaven and hell.

Meanwhile the maiden dares hardly look toward this generous new-comer,
whose destiny lies broad open in his courage and desire. Others she
could conciliate and gently allure, but she will not play with the lion.
She will throw no web around his strength to tear her heart away, if it
does not hold him. For the first time she guards her fancy. She will not
think of the career that awaits him, of the help there is in him for
men, and the honor that will follow him from them,--of the high studies,
tasks, and companionship to which he is hastening. What avails this
avoidance, this turning-away of the head? A fancy that must be kept is
already lost. She read his quality in the first glance of deep-meaning
eyes. When at last he speaks, she sees suddenly how beyond all recovery
he had carried away her soul in that glance. They marry each the
expectation of the other. It was a promise in either that shone so fair.
Happy lovers, if only as wife and husband they can go on to fulfil the
promise! For love cannot be repeated; every day it must have fresh food
in a new object