—What is love—mused I—at the first, but a mere fancy? There is a prettiness that your soul cleaves to, as your eye to a pleasant flower, or your ear to a soft melody. Presently admiration comes in, as a sort of balance wheel for the eccentric revolutions of your fancy; and your admiration is touched off with such neat quality as respect. Too much of this, indeed, they say, deadens the fancy, and so retards the action of the heart machinery. But with a proper modicum to serve as a stock, devotion is grafted in; and then, by an agreeable and confused mingling, all these qualities, and affections of the soul, become transfused into that vital feeling called love. Your heart seems to have gone over to another and better counterpart of your humanity; what is left of you seems the mere husk of some kernel that has been stolen. It is not an emotion of yours, which is making very easy voyages toward another soul—that may be shortened or lengthened at will, but it is a passion that is only yours, because it is _there_; the more it lodges there the more keenly you feel it to be yours. The qualities that feed this passion may indeed belong to you; but they never gave birth to such an one before, simply because there was no place in which it could grow. Nature is very provident in these matters. The chrysalis does not burst until there is a wing to help the gauze-fly upward. The shell does not break until the bird can breathe; nor does the swallow quit its nest until its wings are tipped with the airy oars. This passion of love is strong just in proportion as the atmosphere it finds is tender of its life. Let that atmosphere change into too great coldness, and the passion becomes a wreck—not yours, because it is not worth your having—nor vital, because it has lost the soil where it grew. But is it not laying the reproach in a high quarter to say that those qualities of the heart which begot this passion are exhausted and will not thenceforth germinate through all of your lifetime? —Take away the worm-eaten frame from your arbor plant, and the wrenched arms of the despoiled climber will not at the first touch any new trellis; they can not in a day change the habit of a year. But let the new support stand firmly, and the needy tendrils will presently lay hold upon the stranger! and your plant will regain its pride and pomp, cherishing, perhaps, in its bent figure, a memento of the old, but in its more earnest and abounding life mindful only of its sweet dependence on the new. Let the poets say what they will; these affections of ours are not blind, stupid creatures, to starve under polar snows when the very breezes of heaven are the appointed messengers to guide them toward warmth and sunshine!