爱（2）
For though the celestial rapture falling out of heaven seizes only upon those of tender age, and although a beauty overpowering all analysis or comparison, and putting us quite beside ourselves, we can seldom see after thirty years, yet the remembrance of these visions outlasts all other remembrances, and is a wreath of flowers on the oldest brows. But here is a strange fact; it may seem to many men, in revising their experience, that they have no fairer page in their life’s book than the delicious memory of the same passages wherein affection contrived to give a witchcraft surpassing the deep attraction of its own truth to a parcel of accidental and trivial circumstances. In looking backward, they may find that several things which were not the charm have more reality to this groping memory than the charm itself which embalmed them.
But this dream of love, though beautiful, is only one scene in our play. In the procession of the soul from within outward, it enlarges its circle forever, like the pebble thrown into the pond, or the light proceeding from an orb. The rays of the soul alight first on things nearest. But things are ever grouping themselves according to higher or more interior laws. Cause and effect, real affinities, the longing for harmony between the soul and the circumstance, the progressive, idealizing instinct, predominate later, and the step backward from the higher to the lower relations is impossible. Thus even love, which is the deflection of persons, must become more impersonal every day.
Lovers delight in endearments, in avowals of love, in comparison of their regards. When alone, they solace themselves with the remembered image o