"This poor Cesarini may warn me
against myself!" thought he. "Better hew wood and draw water than attach
ourselves devotedly to an art in which we have not the capacity to
excel.... It is to throw away the healthful objects of life for a
diseased dream,--worse than the Rosicrucians, it is to make a sacrifice
of all human beauty for the smile of a sylphid that never visits us but
in visions." Maltravers looked over his own compositions, and thrust
them into the fire. He slept ill that night. His pride was a little
dejected. He was like a beauty who has seen a caricature of herself.

CHAPTER III.

"Still follow SENSE, of every art the Soul."
POPE: _Moral Essays_--Essay iv.

ERNEST MALTRAVERS spent much of his time with the family of De
Montaigne. There is no period of life in which we are more accessible
to the sentiment of friendship than in the intervals of moral exhaustion
which succeed to the disappointments of the passions. There is, then,
something inviting in those gentler feelings which keep alive, but do
not fever, the circulation of the affections. Maltravers looked with
the benevolence of a brother upon the brilliant, versatile, and restless
Teresa. She was the last person in the world he could have been in
love with--for his nature, ardent, excitable, yet fastidious, required
something of repose in the manners and temperament of the woman whom he
could love, and Teresa scarcely knew what repose was. Whether playing
with her children (and she had two lovely ones--the eldest six years
old), or teasing her calm and meditative husband, or pouring out
extempore verses, or rattling over airs which she never finished, on
the guitar or piano--or making excursions on the lake--or, in short, in
whatever occupation she appeared as the Cynthia of the minute, she was
always gay and mobile--never out of humour, never acknowledging a
single care or cross in life--never susceptible of grief, save when her
brother's delicate health or morbid temper saddened her atmosphere
of sunshine. Even then, the sanguine elasticity of her mind and
constitution quickly recovered from the depression; and she persuaded
herself that Castruccio would grow stronger every year, and ripen into
a celebrated and happy man. Castruccio himself lived what romantic
poetasters call the "life of a poet." He loved to see the sun rise over
the distant Alps--or the midnight moon sleeping on the lake. He spent
half the day, and often half the nigh