We look around for one to share our exquisite
existence, and sanctify the beauties of our being.
But those beauties are only in our thoughts. We feel like heroes,
when we are but boys. Yet our mistress must bear a relation, not to
ourselves, but to our imagination. She must be a real heroine, while our
perfection is but ideal. And the quick and dangerous fancy of our race
will, at first, rise to the pitch. She is all we can conceive. Mild and
pure as youthful priests, we bow down before our altar. But the idol to
which we breathe our warm and gushing vows, and bend our eager knees,
all its power, does it not exist only in our idea; all its beauty, is
it not the creation of our excited fancy? And then the sweetest of
superstitions ends. The long delusion bursts, and we are left like
men upon a heath when fairies vanish; cold and dreary, gloomy, bitter,
harsh, existence seems a blunder.
But just when we are most miserable, and curse the poet's cunning and
our own conceits, there lights upon our path, just like a ray fresh
from the sun, some sparkling child of light, that makes us think we are
premature, at least, in our resolves.
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