proportion, they who till then have wasted the prodigal fervours
of youth upon a sterile soil; who have served Ambition, or, like Aram,
devoted their hearts to Wisdom; relax from their ardour, look back on
the departed years with regret, and commence, in their manhood, the
fiery pleasures and delirious follies which are only pardonable in
youth. In short, as in every human pursuit there is a certain
vanity, and as every acquisition contains within itself the seed of
disappointment, so there is a period of life when we pause from the
pursuit, and are discontented with the acquisition. We then look around
us for something new--again follow--and are again deceived. Few men
throughout life are the servants to one desire. When we gain the middle
of the bridge of our mortality, different objects from those which
attracted us upward almost invariably lure us to the descent. Happy
they who exhaust in the former part of the journey all the foibles of
existence! But how different is the crude and evanescent love of that
age when thought has not given intensity and power to the passions,
from the love which is felt, for the first time, in maturer but still
youthful years! As the flame burns the brighter in proportion to the
resistance which it conquers, this later love is the more glowing in
proportion to the length of time in which it has overcome temptation:
all the solid and, concentred faculties ripened to their full height,
are no longer capable of the infinite distractions, the numberless
caprices of youth; the rays of the heart, not rendered weak by
diversion, collect into one burning focus;

[Love is of the nature of a burning glass, which kept
still in one place, fireth; changed often it doth nothing!"
--Letters by Sir John Suckling.]

the same earnestness and unity of purpose which render what we undertake
in manhood so far more successful than what we would effect in youth,
are equally visible and equally triumphant, whether directed to interest
or to love. But then, as in Aram, the feelings must be fresh as well as
matured; they must not have been frittered away by previous indulgence;
the love must be the first produce of the soil, not the languid
after-growth.

The reader will remark, that the first time in which our narrative has
brought Madeline and Aram together, was not the first time they had met;
Aram had long noted with admiration a beauty which he had never seen
paralleled, and certain vague and