It is common amongst hard and narrow people, who judge the feelings of others by their own want of them, to treat all the painful side of passion with contemptuous levity. They say that people never die for love, and that such fancies may easily be chased away by the exercise of a little resolution. The profounder students of human nature take the subject more seriously. Each of the great poets (including, of course, the author of the "Bride of Lammermoor," in which the poetical elements are so abundant) has treated the aching pain of love and the tragedy to which it may lead, as in the deaths of Haidée, of Lucy Ashton, of Juliet, of Margaret. In real life the powers of evil do not perceive any necessity for an artistic conclusion of their work. A wrinkled old maid may still preserve in the depths of her own heart, quite unsuspected by the young and lively people about her, the unextinguished embers of a passion that first made her wretched fifty years before; and in the long, solitary hours of a dull old age she may live over and over again in memory the brief delirium of that wild and foolish hope which was followed by years of self-repression. Of all the painful situations occasioned by passionate love, I know of none more lamentable than that of an innocent and honorable woman who has been married to an unsuitable husband and who afterwards makes the discovery that she involuntarily loves another. In well-regulated, moral societies such passions are repressed, but they cannot be repressed without suffering which has to be endured in silence. The victim is punished for no fault when none is committed; but she may suffer from the forces of nature like one who hungers and thirsts and sees a fair banquet provided, yet is forbidden to eat or drink. It is difficult to suppress the heart's regret, "Ah, if we had known each other earlier, in the days when I was free, and it was not wrong to love!" Then there is the haunting fear that the woful secret may one day reveal itself to others. Might it not be suddenly and unexpectedly betrayed by a momentary absence of self-control? This has sometimes happened, and then there is no safety but in separation, immediate and decided. Suppose a case like the following, which is said to have really occurred. A perfectly honorable man goes to visit an intimate friend, walks quietly in the garden one afternoon with his friend's wife, and suddenly discovers that he is the object of a passion which, until that moment, she has steadily controlled. One outburst of shameful tears, one pitiful confession of a life's unhappiness, and they part forever! This is what happens when the friend respects his friend and the wife her husband. What happens when both are capable of treachery is known to the readers of English newspaper reports and French fictions.