ke long to verify; so sight is finer
than touch, and thought than sensation. Well-bred instinct meets reason
half-way, and is prepared for the consonances that may follow. Beautiful
things, when taste is formed, are obviously and unaccountably beautiful.
The grounds we may bring ourselves to assign for our preferences are
discovered by analysing those preferences, and articulate judgments
follow upon emotions which they ought to express, but which they
sometimes sophisticate. So, too, the reasons we give for love either
express what it feels or else are insincere, attempting to justify at
the bar of reason and convention something which is far more primitive
than they and underlies them both. True instinct can dispense with such
excuses. It appeals to the event and is justified by the response which
nature makes to it. It is, of course, far from infallible; it cannot
dominate circumstances, and has no discursive knowledge; but it is
presumably true, and what it foreknows is always essentially possible.
Unrealisable it may indeed be in the jumbled context of this world,
where the Fates, like an absent-minded printer, seldom allow a single
line to stand perfect and unmarred.

The profoundest affinities are those most readily felt, and though a
thousand later considerations may overlay and override them, they remain
a background and standard for all happiness. If we trace them out we
succeed. If we put them by, although in other respects we may call
ourselves happy, we inwardly know that we have dismissed the ideal, and
all that was essentially possible has not been realised. Love in that
case still owns a hidden and potential object, and we sanctify, perhaps,
whatever kindnesses or partialities we indulge in by a secret loyalty to
something impersonal and unseen. Such reserve, such religion, would not
have been necessary had things responded to our first expectations. We
might then have identified the ideal with the object that happened to
call it forth. The Life of Reason might have been led instinctively, and
we might have been guided by nature herself into the ways of peace.

[Sidenote: Its ideality.]

As it is, circumstances, false steps, or the mere lapse of time, force
us to shuffle our affections and take them as they come, or as we are
suffered to indulge them. A mother is followed by a boyish friend, a
friend by a girl, a girl by a wife, a wife by a child, a child by an
idea. A divinity passes through these var