At morning you cannot tell if it was real or a dream. Those higher resolves too, which grief and the night made, seem very vague and shadowy. Life with its ambitious and cankerous desires wakes again. You do not feel them at first; the subjugation of holy thoughts and of reaches toward the Infinite, leave their traces on you, and perhaps bewilder you into a half-consciousness of strength. But at the first touch of the grosser elements about you,--on your very first entrance upon those duties which quicken pride or shame, and which are pointing at you from every quarter,--your holy calm, your high-born purpose, your spiritual cleavings, pass away, like the electricity of August storms drawn down by the thousand glittering turrets of a city! The world is stronger than the night; and the bindings of sense are tenfold stronger than the most exquisite delirium of soul. This makes you feel, or will one day make you feel, that life,--strong life and sound life,--that life which lends approaches to the Infinite, and takes hold on Heaven, is not so much a PROGRESS as it is a RESISTANCE! There is one special confidence which, in all your talk about plans and purposes, you do not give to your father: you reserve that for the ear of Nelly alone. Why happens it that a father is almost the last confidant that a son makes in any matter deeply affecting the feelings? Is it the fear that a father may regard such matter as boyish? Is it a lingering suspicion of your own childishness; or of that extreme of affection which reduces you to childishness? Why is it always that a man, of whatever age or condition, forbears to exhibit to those whose respect for his judgment and mental abilities only he seeks, the most earnest qualities of the heart, and those intenser susceptibilities of love which underlie his nature, and which give a color in spite of him to the habit of his life? Why is he so morbidly anxious to keep out of sight any extravagances of affection, when he blurts officiously to the world his extravagances of action and of thought? Can any lover explain me this? Again, why is a sister the one of all others to whom you first whisper the dawnings of any strong emotion,--as if it were a weakness that her charity alone could cover? However this may be, you have a long story for Nelly's ear. It is some days after your return: you are strolling down a quiet, wooded lane,--a remembered place,--when you first open to her your heart. Your talk is of Laura Dalton. You describe her to Nelly with the extravagance of a glowing hope. You picture those qualities that have attracted you most; you dwell upon her beauty, her elegant figure, her grace of conversation, her accomplishments. You make a study that feeds your passion as you go on. You rise by the very glow of your speech into a frenzy of feeling that she has never excited before. You are quite sure that you would be wretched and miserable without her. "Do you mean to marry her?" says Nelly.