Page:All the Year Round - Series 2 - Volume 1.djvu/171

 Adam, and each man lives for a time in a paradise of his own making, which no brother has ever shared. We and our special Eve dwell in it alone, for just so long a time as the fervour and inexperience of our first passion last. The pity is, that it lasts so short a time, and that we wake, while yet so young to the consciousness that all this exquisite delight is only delusion, and that "the mind sees what it brings" in love as well as in other things.

The love of a boy or girl is unique. It is never repeated in kind, though it may be even surpassed in degree; for the love of the mature heart is more powerful than that of the youthful; but the freshness, the ecstatic sense of certainty, the sublime belief in itself and its own immortality, in its unchangeableness and future, characteristic of the first young love, have no echo even in the strength and fidelity of the mature. Besides, it is so divinely blind; and its blindness remains, though the eyes may be couched to see everything else. Though our early charmer was snub-nosed and red headed, and fully half a dozen years our elder, yet our memory plays magic tricks with reality, and we think of her to this day, as we believed her at the time: beautiful, golden haired, and sixteen. If we have never seen her since that fatal hour when we tore ourselves from her side in an agony of despair at the cruel fate which sent us to New Zealand or the West Indies, no shock of personal experience has shattered the sweet falsehood of our boyish dreams, and she will always be to us what she was; but if we have seen her after our eyes have been couched, we stand aghast, as at the discovery of some Mélusine in her serpent state. That plain-featured, commonplace dowdy is no more the peerless Dulcinea of only ten years ago, than she is her own grandmother. Henceforth she is two persons: the one, living in memory: the other in actuality; and of the two the remembrance is the more real.

No one makes any allowance for the action of time in another, or expects to find any striking change, how long soever the interval between the last parting and the present meeting. An increasing waistcoat and a decreasing chevelure in ourselves, tell us beyond all question of an airy youth for ever fled, and a middle-aged respectability settled down heavily in its stead: yet we look to find our boyish ideal exactly where we left her, and heave no end of deprecatory sighs when we see the thickened jowl, the broadened waist, the puffy foot, the meagre wisp of greyish hair, sole remnant of those glorious tresses which might have been Godiva's. "Who would have thought it?" we say compassionately, forgetting the lesson set us daily by our own looking-glass. And then we turn our faces backward, and know that the Godiva of our early love is dead, buried ten fathoms deep by the almighty hand of Time, and that she has left only her memory to keep us company. But her memory is immortal, and over this Time has no kind of power.

Yet there are old loves for whom, when we have got over the first shock of disappointment at finding that forty is not as twenty was, we knit up the ravelled edges of time, and carry the past into the present—if in paler colours and a less florid pattern, yet with a joined thread that makes the two epochs one. Our love remains the same in essentials, with a difference in forms. A tender mellowness of affection has taken the place of the old fervid fiery passion which once consumed as much as it warmed, and we seem to have carried on into the present the whole accumulated strength of the past. Certain phrases, looks, and tones, remind us so vividly of bygone days that at last we lose all sharpness of perception, and can scarcely distinguish between then and now, till the past becomes the present, blended and inseparable, and the mind cannot recognise any break. We all know instances of the first love married after the severance perhaps of a quarter of a century, with two flourishing families in the mean time—instances where maturity has taken up the parable of youth, and life has doubled back upon itself, and ended at its starting place. Such reunions are not necessarily either happy or unsuccessful. It all depends on the amount of mental sympathy possible between the pair, after the warping of their diverse experiences, whether the memory of their youthful fancy can be consolidated into a living love or no. If the love have been very true and earnest, and if it have never failed, though it may have been overlaid and even forgotten, the chances are that the marriage will be happy; but say it has been only a fancy, without solid foundation in the inner chambers of the heart, and then the chances are the other way, and the look out is dubious. But even then, and at the worst, the luckless experimenters have the memory of the tune when they thought they loved. At the worst, they can lay the blame on tune and distance, and think: "Ah, well! if they had been married early in life, when they wished it, they would have fitted better than they do now; they would have each been more plastic, and by this time would have been welded together as well as wedded." But an adverse fate came in between, and hardened angles are the result.

There is something inexpressibly soothing to our failing vanity, in being with those who have known us at our best. "Ah! you should have known him twenty years ago," is a salve to many a man's mortification when a young and irreverent generation passes him by as an old fogey, not worth a thought—he who once charmed his club and commanded a following as large as a moderate sized constituency. And if this be true of men, it is still more so of women, who depend for social repute and influence more on their personal charms—which time ruthlessly handles—than on their intellectual acquirements, which are of tougher material, and not so soon frayed and torn. In fact, one of the best things about early marriages hangs on this point. The gradual carrying on into old age of the beauty and sweetness of youth, gives a kind of youth even to old age. A new husband would be ashamed to take about that