an's wife. She thought she could live in a little, mean house on
no-matter-what-street, with one servant, and make her own bonnets
and mend her own clothes, and sweep the house Mondays, while Betty
washed,--all for what? All because she thought that there was a man
so noble, so true, so good, so high-minded, that to live with him in
poverty, to be guided by him in adversity, to lean on him in every rough
place of life, was a something nobler, better, purer, more satisfying,
than French laces, opera-boxes, and even Madame Roget's best gowns.

Unfortunately, this was all romance,--there was no such man. There
was, indeed, a person of very common, self-interested aims and worldly
nature, whom she had credited at sight with an unlimited draft on all
her better nature; and when the hour of discovery came, she awoke
from her dream with a start and a laugh, and ever since has despised
aspiration, and been busy with the _realities_ of life, and feeds poor
little Mary Jane, who sits by her in the opera-box there, with all the
fruit which she has picked from the bitter tree of knowledge. There is
no end of the epigrams and witticisms which she can throw out, this
elegant Mrs. T., on people who marry for love, lead prosy, worky lives,
and put on their best cap with pink ribbons for Sunday. "Mary Jane shall
never make a fool of herself"; but, even as she speaks, poor Mary Jane's
heart is dying within her at the vanishing of a pair of whiskers from an
opposite box,--which whiskers the poor little fool has credited with a
_resume_ drawn from her own imaginings of all that is grandest and
most heroic, most worshipful in man. By-and-by, when Mrs. T. finds the
glamour has fallen on her daughter, she wonders; she has "tried to keep
novels out of the girl's way,--where did she get these notions?"

All prosaic, and all bitter, disenchanted people talk as if poets
and novelists _made_ romance. They do,--just as much as craters make
volcanoes,--no more. What is romance? whence comes it? Plato spoke to
the subject wisely, in his quaint way, some two thousand years ago, when
he said, "Man's soul, in a former state, was winged and soared among the
gods; and so it comes to pass, that, in this life, when the soul, by the
power of music or poetry, or the sight of beauty, hath her remembrance
quickened, forthwith there is a straggling and a pricking pain as of
wings trying to come forth,--even as children in teething." And if an
old heathen, two th