Unattainable? Ay, surely unattainable,
from the very fact that they are two instead of one.
*
When the generation is gone, when the play is over, when
the thirty years' panorama has been withdrawn in tatters
from the stage of the world, we may ask what has become of
these great, weighty, and undying loves and the sweethearts
who despised mortal conditions in a fine credulity; and
they can only show us a few songs in a bygone taste, a few
actions worth remembering, and a few children who have
retained some happy stamp from the disposition of their
parents.
*
Hope looks for unqualified success; but Faith counts
certainly on failure, and takes honourable defeat to be a
form of victory. In the first, he expects an angel for a
wife; in the last, he knows that she is like himself-
erring, thoughtless, and untrue; but like himself also,
filled with a struggling radiancy of better things, and
adorned with ineffective qualities. You may safely go to
school with hope; but, ere you marry, should have learned
the mingled lesson of the world: that dolls are stuffed
with sawdust, and yet are excellent playthings; that hope
and love address themselves to a perfection never realised,
and yet, firmly held, become the salt and staff of life;
that you yourself are compacted of infirmities, perfect,
you might say, in imperfections, and yet you have a
something in you lovable and worth preserving; and that,
while the mass of mankind lies under this scurvy
condemnation, you will scarce find one but, by some
generous reading, will become to you a lesson, a model, and
a noble spouse through life.
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