Page:Francesca Carrara 1.pdf/116

112 and obligation on the other; but their reciprocity of affection, their mutual exchange of small kindnesses—those strongest rivets of common attachment—were no more.

Guido's thoughts were very different to his cousin's: he partook not in her depression—his eye was caught by the scene before him, its novelty excited his imagination, and he was wrapt in the happiness of again seeing Marie. He was strong, too, in the conscious superiority of talent—that first hope of genius, as yet unchecked by circumstances, and unbroken by experience. He leant by the window, half alive to the gorgeous picture which moved around him, and half lost in delicious dreams of all the splendid impossibilities which he was to achieve.

Nothing at first frames such false estimates as an imaginative temperament. It finds the power of creation so easy, the path it fashions so actual, that no marvel for a time hope is its own security, and the fancied world appears the true copy of the real. How much of disappointment—what a bitter draining of the cup of mortification to the dregs—does it take, to sober down the ardour, and chain the winged thoughts of a mind so constituted! Let any, now perhaps staid with care, and grave with many sorrows, but who once