Page:Romance & Reality 1.pdf/217

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ROMANCE AND REALITY.
211

early inculcated upon him—he knows, that if he would win, he must woo—and his imagination acts chiefly as a stimulus. But a woman's is of a more passive kind; she has no motive for analysing feelings whose future rests not with herself: more imaginative from early sedentary habits, she is content to dream on, and some chance reveals to herself the secret she would never have learnt from self-investigation. Imbued with all the timidity, exalted by all the romance of a first attachment, never did a girl yet calculate on making what is called a conquest of the man she loves. A conquest is the resource of weariness—the consolation of disappointment—a second world of vanity and ambition, sighed for like Alexander's, but not till we have wasted and destroyed the heart's first sweet world of early love.

Let Lord Byron say what he will of bread and butter, girlhood is a beautiful season, and its love—its warm, uncalculating, devoted love—so exaggerating in its simplicity—so keen from its freshness—is the very poetry of attachment: after-years have nothing like it. To know that the love which once seemed eternal can have an end, destroys its immor-