But this rapture is not to last. The time is to come when the prospect which depended on the influence of passion, however noble, and prejudice, however honest, shall melt away from the view. The mind, raised to a pitch of enjoyment above the reality of sublunary happiness, is in danger when the faces of things appear at once in their proper colours, of sinking to a degree equally below it. He, who in the glow of his earlier feelings, feasted his eye with increasing transport, on the gay and captivating scenery, with which the creative power of an ardent imagination had overspread the barrenness of reality, now begins to find a thousand little deceptions wear away. The insipidity and nakedness of many an object, which, at a distance, had attracted his eagerness, and roused the keenness of his passions, press so close upon him, that even prejudice and enthusiasm fail to operate the accustomed delusion. The little vanity, so often interwoven with the best natures, receives a variety of unexpected and grievous wounds. As the mists which clouded his better judgment retire, on every side he discovers with astonishment, that a dupe to self-deception, he has, like a blind idolator, fallen prostrate before the gaudy images his own hands have formed and decorated. He perceives that he has walked in a world of his own creation, that life and man are still before him to study, and he only recovers his cooler reason to feel the loss of that mental elevation, that brilliant perception of things, which, though ideal, were so dear to him. But perhaps this is not all, nor does the discovery which scourges vanity, and detects the harmless fallacies of judgment, alone await him. Perhaps the hour of deception has treasured up disappointment more heavy and intolerable. What are his sensations, if the truth he now begins anxiously and fearfully to learn, is brought immediately home to his own bosom, and he is doomed to feel that the exalted and glowing ideas of friendship, which first expanded his soul, shrink even in his view, and leave his breast void and desolate. When in the heart, which his earliest ideas had imaged as the residence of that sacred passion, the trial of experience detects hollowness and falsehood. When it is his bitter lot to mark the progress of alienated affection, to watch the subsidence of cooling attachment, to feel the ties connected in an honest and unsuspicious bosom with all his first enjoyments of happiness, beginning one by one to untwine. When he is to groan under the pang of the heart, which accompanies the tearing out of the thousand little habits of confidence, the innumerable kindly affections, which long custom had rooted in the soul, and made a part of the pleasantness of existence; or when he is to experience the agony of the moment, when he, in whom the bosom fondly trusted, insults the confidence he has cruelly violated, and aggravates by unfeeling mockery the distress his perfidy has excited.