These rosy phantoms, which gild some of the most beautiful hours of our child-life, seem to last only as long as the morning twilight; and certainly the battles of youth often cause them to be forgotten. And many, with slippery memories and skeptical hearts, when they hear them mentioned have only words of contempt and gestures of pity for what they are pleased to term infantile lullabies to be relegated among the horrors of the witches and the caresses of the nurse. And yet how often these fleeting phantoms announce the storms of the future, reveal a deeply enamored nature and weave the first threads of a long fabric of delirious joys and torments! Some very, very fortunate mortal, on his death-bed, could press the hand of the only woman he had ever loved, whom he had loved when still a child, before he even knew she was a woman. The trembling lips of the dying man could link the last kiss of life with the first noisy, insolent, clumsy kiss on the soft cheek of a ten-year-old girl. And without trying to reach this loftiest sphere of an ideal too far removed from our existence, how often, after a long life hardened by the tortures of a hundred passions, after having lost faith and love, in the dusk of the early evening a last rosy flash of sunset awakened a dear memory, buried many years since, and the heart of an old man throbbed and a tear ran down his wrinkled face! Before the weary eyes a little straw hat had passed, with two blue streamers, but in the depths of the heart what an abyss of dear memories had opened in an instant! In the night of the past, a limpid ray of light had illumined a picture all life and all beauty; an antique cameo had appeared under the pick of the gravedigger, among ruins and dust! And that picture was a childish love, a flower carried away by the turbid torrent of a storm, but preserved by the friendly hand of memory, which, after all, is not always ungrateful or cruel. If you ask a boy why he loves a little girl, he will blush and run away; if you ask the little girl, her face will flush and she will answer with a sublime impertinence. They love--_and they know not why_! Ask a precocious rosebud why it wanted to bloom in March, instead of awaiting the warm and voluptuous air of May; ask a July cyclamen why it did not await the cool breezes of September to perfume the mossy bed in which it had made its nest. _They love, and they know not why!_ In passionate men the first light of love appears sooner, because Nature, fruitful and impatient, longs to give her flowers, and an entire life will be for them too short a day to satisfy the intense thirst of love which consumes them. They love soon because they love much; as men of genius, at ten years of age, often conceive that which the masses will never conceive at thirty.