Godolphin felt, too, that the sole impulse which could have united the fast-expiring energy and enterprise of his youth to the ambition of life was for ever gone. With Constance--with the proud thoughts that belonged to her--the aspirings after earthly honours were linked, and with her were broken. He felt his old philosophy--the love of ease, the profound contempt for fame,--close, like the deep waters over those glittering hosts for whose passage they had been severed for a moment--whelming the crested and gorgeous visions for ever beneath the wave! Conscious of his talents--nay, swayed to and fro by the unquiet stirrings of no common genius--Godolphin yet foresaw that he was not henceforth destined to play a shining part in the crowded drama of life. His career was already closed; he might be contented, prosperous, happy, but never great. He had seen enough of authors, and of the thorns that beset the paths of literature, to experience none of those delusions which cheat the blinded aspirer into the wilderness of publication--that mode of obtaining fame and hatred to which those who feel unfitted for more bustling concerns are impelled. Write he might: and he was fond (as disappointment increased his propensities to dreaming) of brightening his solitude with the golden palaces and winged shapes that lie glassed within the fancy--the soul’s fairy-land. But the vision with him was only evoked one hour to be destroyed the next. Happy had it been for Godolphin, and not unfortunate perhaps for the world, had he learned at that exact moment the true motive for human action which he afterwards, and too late, discovered. Happy had it been for him to have learned that there is an ambition to do good--an ambition to raise the wretched as well as to rise. Alas!--either in letters or in politics, how utterly poor, barren, and untempting, is every path that points upward to the mockery of public eminence, when looked upon by a soul that has any real elements of wise or noble; unless we have an impulse within, which mortification chills not--a reward without, which selfish defeat does not destroy. But, unblest by one friend really wise or good, spoilt by the world, soured by disappointment, Godolphin’s very faculties made him inert, and his very wisdom taught him to be useless. Again and again--as the spider in some cell where no winged insect ever wanders, builds and rebuilds his mesh,--the scheming heart of the Idealist was doomed to weave net after net for those visions of the Lovely and the Perfect which can never descend to the gloomy regions wherein mortality is cast. The most common disease to genius is nympholepsy--the saddening for a spirit that the world knows not. Ah! how those outward disappointments which should cure, only feed the disease!