Charles Dickens.]

OLD LOYES,

[January 16, 1M9] 161

Adam, and each man lives for a time in a para-
dise 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
wr akc, while yet so young to the conscious-
ness 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
i 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 unchangeable-
ness and future, characteristic of the first
young love, have no echo even in the strength
and fidelity of the mature. Besides, it is so di-
vinely 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 Melusine 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. Hence-
fortli 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
'lability settled down heavily in its stead:
yet we look to find our boyish ideal exactly
where we left her, and heave no end of depre-
catory 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 com-
passionately, 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
divp by the almighty hand of Time, and that
she has left only her memory to keep us com-
pany. 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 disappoint-

ment at finding that forty is not as twenty
was, we knit up the ravelled edges of tune,
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 mellow-
ness 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 accumu-
lated strength of the past. Certain phrases,
looks, and tones, remind Us so vividly of by-
gone 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 in-
stances where maturity has taken up the para-
ble of youth, and Hie 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 tune 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 in-
fluence more on their personal charms which
time ruthlessly handles than on their intellec-
tual 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