But the live one is very lively. When you take the name on your lip, it seems somehow, to be made of different materials from the rest; you cannot half so easily separate it into letters; write it, indeed you can; for you have had practice—very much private practice—on odd scraps of paper, and on the fly-leaves of geographies, and of your natural philosophy. You know perfectly well how it looks; it seems to be written, indeed, somewhere behind your eyes; and in such happy position with respect to the optic nerve, that you see it all the time, though you are looking in an opposite direction; and so distinctly, that you have great fears lest people looking into your eyes should see it too! For all this, it is a far more delicate name to handle than most that you know of. Though it is very cool, and pleasant on the brain, it is very hot, and difficult to manage on the lip. It is not, as your schoolmaster would say—a name, so much as it is an idea—not a noun, but a verb—an active, and transitive verb; and yet a most irregular verb, wanting the passive voice. It is something against your schoolmaster’s doctrine, to find warmth in the moonlight; but with that soft hand—it is very soft—lying within your arm, there is a great deal of warmth, whatever the philosophers may say, even in pale moonlight. The beams, too, breed sympathies, very close-running sympathies—not talked about in the chapters on optics, and altogether too fine for language. And under their influence, you retain the little hand, that you had not dared retain so long before; and her struggle to recover it—if indeed it be a struggle—is infinitely less than it was—nay, it is a kind of struggle, not so much against you, as between gladness and modesty. It makes you as bold as a lion; and the feeble hand, like a poor lamb in the lion’s clutch, is powerless, and very meek—and failing of escape, it will sue for gentle treatment; and will meet your warm promise, with a kind of grateful pressure, that is but half acknowledged, by the hand that makes it. My cigar is burning with wondrous freeness; and from the smoke flash forth images bright and quick as lightning—with no thunder, but the thunder of the pulse. But will it all last? Damp will deaden the fire of a cigar; and there are hellish damps—alas, too many—that will deaden the early blazing of the heart.