passionate fondness and extravagant
admiration, whose ring is too true and strong for doubt concerning
their reality to find a place.

Many men are swayed by strong and wayward impulses; but to most the
fetters imposed by social conventions, by inherited or implanted
standards of seemliness and decorum, suffice to steady them in the
path of outward propriety. Of how great and absorbing a passion Lord
Nelson was capable is shown by the immensity of the sacrifice that he
made to it. Principle apart,--and principle wholly failed him,--all
else that most appeals to man's self-respect and regard for the esteem
of others was powerless to exert control. Loyalty to friendship, the
sanctity which man is naturally fain to see in the woman he loves,
and, in Nelson's own case, a peculiar reluctance to wound
another,--all these were trampled under foot, and ruthlessly piled on
the holocaust which he offered to her whom he worshipped. He could
fling to the winds, as others cannot, considerations of interest or
expediency, as he flung them over and over in his professional career.
My motto, he said once and again, is "All or nothing." The same
disregard of consequences that hazarded all for all, in battle or for
duty, broke through the barriers within which prudence, reputation,
decency, or even weakness and cowardice, confine the actions of lesser
men. And it must be remembered that the admitted great stain upon
Nelson's fame, which it would be wicked to deny, lies not in a general
looseness of life, but in the notoriety of one relation,--a notoriety
due chiefly to the reckless singleness of heart which was not ashamed
to own its love, but rather gloried in the public exhibition of a
faith in the worthiness of its object, and a constancy, which never
wavered to the hour of his death.[14] The pitifulness of it is to see
the incongruity between such faith, such devotion, and the distasteful
inadequacy of their object.

To answer the demands of a nature capable of such energetic
manifestation--to fulfil the imagination of one who could so cast
himself at the feet of an ideal--was beyond the gentle, well-ordered,
and somewhat prosaic charms with which alone Mrs. Nisbet was invested
by Nelson, even when most loverlike in tone. "My greatest wish," he
writes in the first of his letters to her that has been preserved,
"is to be united to you; and the foundation of all conjugal happiness,
real love and esteem, is, I trust, what you believe