“If the Countess of Tripoli, who seems also to have owned a susceptible temperament, had been his cousin and lived next door, he would probably not have admired her the least, would certainly never have wooed her in such wild and pathetic verse; but he gave her credit for all the charms that constituted his own ideal of perfection, and sickened even to death for the possession of his distant treasure, simply and solely because it was _so far away_! “What people all really love is a dream. The stronger the imagination the more vivid the phantom that fills it; but on the other hand, the waking is more sudden and more complete. If I were a woman instead of a—a—specimen, I should beware how I set my heart upon a man of imagination, a quality which the world is apt to call genius, with as much good sense as there would be in confounding the sparks from a blacksmith’s anvil with the blacksmith himself. Such a man takes the first doll that flatters him, dresses her out in the fabrications of his own fancy, falls down and worships, gets bored, and gets up, pulls the tinsel off as quick as he put it on; being his own he thinks he may do what he likes with it, and finds any other doll looks just as well in the same light and decked with the same trappings. Narcissus is not the only person who has fallen in love with the reflection, or what he believed to be the reflection, of himself. Some get off with a ducking, some are drowned in sad earnest for their pains. “Nevertheless, as the French philosopher says, ‘There is nothing so real as illusion.’ The day that is dead has for men a more actual, a more tangible, a more vivid identity than the day that exists, nay, than the day as yet unborn. One of the most characteristic and inconvenient delusions of humanity is its incapacity for enjoyment of the present. Life is a journey in which people are either looking forward or looking back. Nobody has the wisdom to sit down for half-an-hour in the shade listening to the birds overhead, examining the flowers underfoot. It is always ‘How pleasant it was yesterday! What fun we shall have to-morrow!’ Never ‘How happy we are to-day!’ And yet what _is_ the past, when we think of it, but a dream vanished into darkness—the future but an uncertain glimmer that may never brighten into dawn?