To reason upon the effects of the discovery, or confession of our feelings, was not a process for which either of us was qualified by temperament or inclination. We did not pause to consider whether it was prudent to take our hearts and natures for granted all at once, and risk upon the strange delight of a single moment of luxurious emotion the happiness, perhaps, of a whole lifetime. We did not stop to ask if there were any obstacles in the way, any jarring chords to be attuned, any thing to be known or thought of into which our position demanded a scrutiny. We resigned ourselves at once to our impulses. We believed that we had seen enough of the world, and were strong enough in our self-sustaining power, and clear enough in our penetration, to dispense with ordinary safeguards, and act as if we were superior to them. We made our own world, and so went on as if we could control the planet in which we lived at our own will and pleasure. I soon perceived that my attentions to Astræa had become a subject of much remark. The peering coterie about us were so vigilant in matters of that kind, that, as it appeared afterward, they had found out the fact before it had taken place. For my own part, there was nobody half so much surprised at the circumstance as I was myself. I believed that the heart, like that plant which is said to blow once and die, was incapable of a second growth of love; but I now felt the fallacy of that doctrine, and was at first humiliated by the discovery. It struck me like a great heresy against truth and purity; it seemed to lay bare before me the corruptibility and feebleness of poor human nature. To strive against it, however, was idle. The second growth was in full flower, yet with a difference from the first, which I could detect even against the grain of the passion that was subjugating me. I felt that the second growth was less simple and devotional than the first; that it had more exuberance, and was of a wilder character; that it struck not its roots so deeply, but spread its blossoms more widely; that it was less engrossing, but more agitating; that it was cultivated with greater consciousness and premeditation, risked with more caution, fed with more prudence, and tended more constantly--but all with a lesser waste of the imagination; that its delights were more fervid but less appeasing; that it looked not so much into the future with hope and promise, as it filled the present with rapture; that its memories were neither so sad nor so vivid, and that it let in caprice, and vanity, and unreasonableness, and self-love, and the world's esteem, which are all as dust in the balance, or a feather in the whirlwind, to impetuous love. I was amazed to find myself a daily waiter upon beauty. Yet so it was. The vision of Gertrude was now gone from my path--the spectre had vanished in the broad light of the new passion.