it about through the mental spaces as a
reflection is sent back and forward in a saloon lined with mirrors.
With this altered image of the woman before him his preexisting ideal
becomes blended. The object of his love is half the offspring of her
legal parents and half of her lover's brain. The difference between
the real and the ideal objects of love must not exceed a fixed
maximum. The heart's vision cannot unite them stereoscopically into a
single image, if the divergence passes certain limits. A formidable
analogy, much in the nature of a proof, with very serious
consequences, which moralists and match-makers would do well to
remember! Double vision with the eyes of the heart is a dangerous
physiological state, and may lead to missteps and serious falls.

Whether Dudley Venner would ever find a breathing image near enough to
his ideal one, to fill the desolate chamber of his heart, or not, was
very doubtful. Some gracious and gentle woman, whose influence would
steal upon him as the first low words of prayer after that interval of
silent mental supplication known to one of our simpler forms of public
worship, gliding into his consciousness without hurting its old
griefs, herself knowing the chastening of sorrow, and subdued into
sweet acquiescence with the Divine will,--some such woman as this, if
Heaven should send him such, might call him back to the world of
happiness, from which he seemed forever exiled. He could never again
be the young lover who walked through the garden-alleys all red with
roses in the old dead and buried June of long ago. He could never
forget the bride of his youth, whose image, growing phantom-like with
the lapse of years, hovered over him like a dream while waking and
like a reality in dreams. But if it might be in God's good providence
that this desolate life should come under the influence of human
affections once more, what an ecstasy of renewed existence was in
store for him! His life had not all been buried under that narrow
ridge of turf with the white stone at its head. It seemed so for a
while; but it was not and could not and ought not to be so. His first
passion had been a true and pure one; there was no spot or stain upon
it. With all his grief there blended no cruel recollection of any word
or look he would have wished to forget. All those little differences,
such as young married people with any individual flavor in their
characters must have, if they are tolerably mated, ha