retrace, either for ourselves or others—till another evening of purple sunset saw, in that church where they had first met, Algernon kneeling by the side of the beautiful Francisca, while a priest pronounced the marriage blessing—a pale, aged man, to whose wan lips seemed rather to belong the prayer for a burial than aught that had to do with life or enjoyment.
Truly does passion live but in the present. Algernon[1] knew his marriage was not legal; but her he loved was now his by a sacred vow—and when the future came, he might be entirely his own master: the Janus of Love's year may have two faces, but they look only on each other. The worst of a mind so constituted is, that its feelings cannot last, least of all its love; it measures all things by its expectations—and expectations have that sort of ideal beauty no reality can equal: moreover, in the moral as in the physical world, the violent is never the lasting—the tree forced into unnatural luxuriance of blossom bears them and dies. Francisca, beautiful but weak, without power to comprehend, or intellect to take part with her lover, somewhat accelerated the re-action; and Algernon[2] now saw the full extent of the sacrifice he had made, and the mortifications that
