xclaimed, 'I am a victim; disguise them as
I may, all the considerations are worldly. There is, there must be,
something better in this world than power and wealth and rank; and
surely there must be felicity more rapturous even than securing the
happiness of a parent. Ah! dreams in which I have so oft and so fondly
indulged, are ye, indeed, after all, but fantastical and airy visions?
Is love indeed a delusion, or am I marked out from men alone to be
exempted from its delicious bondage? It must be a delusion. All laugh
at it, all jest about it, all agree in stigmatising it the vanity of
vanities. And does my experience contradict this harsh but common fame?
Alas! what have I seen or known to give the lie to this ill report?
No one, nothing. Some women I have met more beautiful, assuredly, than
Kate, and many, many less fair; and some have crossed my path with a
wild and brilliant grace, that has for a moment dazzled my sight, and
perhaps for a moment lured me from my way. But these shooting stars
have but glittered transiently in my heaven, and only made me, by their
evanescent brilliancy, more sensible of its gloom. Let me believe then,
oh! let me of all men then believe, that the forms that inspire
the sculptor and the painter have no models in nature; that that
combination of beauty and grace, of fascinating intelligence and
fond devotion, over which men brood in the soft hours of their young
loneliness, is but the promise of a better world, and not the charm of
this one.

'But, what terror in that truth! what despair! what madness! Yes!
at this moment of severest scrutiny, how profoundly I feel that life
without love is worse than death! How vain and void, how flat and
fruitless, appear all those splendid accidents of existence for which
men struggle, without this essential and pervading charm! What a world
without a sun! Yes! without this transcendent sympathy, riches and rank,
and even power and fame, seem to me at best but jewels set in a coronet
of lead!

'And who knows whether that extraordinary being, of whose magnificent
yet ruinous career this castle is in truth a fitting emblem--I say, who
knows whether the secret of his wild and restless course is not hidden
in this same sad lack of love? Perhaps while the world, the silly,
superficial world, marvelled and moralised at his wanton life, and
poured forth its anathemas against his heartless selfishness, perchance
he all the time was sighing for some soft bo