JOHN A LOVE STORY BY MRS OLIPHANT AUTHOR OF 'CHRONICLES OF CARLINGFORD,' ETC. IN TWO VOLUMES VOL. II. WILLIAM BLACKWOOD AND SONS EDINBURGH AND LONDON MDCCCLXX _ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED IN BLACKWOOD’S MAGAZINE_ JOHN. CHAPTER XV. There is nothing so hard in human experience as to fit in the exceptional moments of life into their place, and bring them into a certain harmony with that which surrounds them; and in youth it is doubly hard to understand how it is that the exceptional can come only in moments. When the superlative either of misery or happiness arrives, there is nothing so difficult to an imaginative mind as to descend from that altitude and allow that the commonplace must return, and the ordinary resume its sway. And perhaps, more than any other crisis, the crisis of youthful passion and romance is the one which it is most difficult to come down from. It has wound up the young soul to an exaltation which has scarcely any parallel in life; even to the least visionary, the event which has happened--the union which has taken place between one heart and another--the sentiment which has concentrated all beauty and lovableness and desirableness in one being, and made that being his--is something too supreme and dazzling to fall suddenly into the light of common day. John Mitford was not matter of fact, and the situation to him was doubly exciting. It was attended, besides, by the disruption of his entire life; and though he would readily have acknowledged that the rest of his existence could not be passed in those exquisite pangs and delights--that mixture of absolute rapture in being with her, and visionary despair at her absence--which had made up the story of his brief courtship; yet there was in him a strong unexpressed sense that the theory of life altogether must henceforward be framed on a higher level--that a finer ideal was before him, higher harmonies, a more perfect state of being; instead of all which dreams, when he came to himself he was seated on a high stool, before a desk, under the dusty window of Mr Crediton’s bank, with the sound of the swinging door, and the voices of the public, and the crackle of notes, and the jingle of coin in his ears, and a tedious trade to learn, in which there seemed to him no possible satisfaction of any kind! When John had said--in that golden age which already seemed centuries past--that a clergyman’s was the only work worth doing, he had meant, that it was the only work for mankind in which a man could have any confidence. He had said so, while in the same breath he had expressed his want of absolute belief; and the one sentiment had not affected the other.