24 COUNTRY ESSAYS. 



cardinal virtue, inseparable from success, that resolution is 

 sorely tried. And to falter herein is fatal. Especially may 

 one's own heart cause him to stumble. Unless youth betimes 

 stops its ears, like Ulysses, some siren, who as in his age yet 

 haunts the seaside, may lure him to idleness and so to de- 

 struction of many a bright dream ; for the generous emotions 

 are strong, and the fire of love blazes forth at a glance or a 

 word. Most people possess a romance whose ghost is laid by 

 the sea, enclosed in a summer month and cast into the ocean 

 of the past. And most people, we may add, are fond at cer- 

 tain times of imitating the fishermen of the Arabian Nights, 

 opening the case and suffering the imprisoned spirit to spread 

 himself over the face of heaven and earth. " No man ever 

 forgot," says Emerson,* " the visitations of that power to his 

 heart and brain which created all things new; which was the 

 dawn in him of music, poetry, and art ; which made the face 

 of nature radiant with purple light, the morning and the night 

 varied enchantments ; when a single tone of one voice could 

 make the heart beat, and the most trivial circumstance associ- 

 ated with one form is preserved in the amber of memory ; 

 when we became all eye when one was present, and all memory 

 when one was gone ; when the youth becomes a watcher of 

 windows, and studious of a glove, a veil, a ribbon, or the wheels 

 of a carriage ; when no place is too solitary, and none too 

 silent for him who has richer company and sweeter conversa- 

 tion in his new thoughts than any old friends, though best and 

 purest, can give him ; for the figures, the motions, the words, 

 of the beloved object, are not, like other images, written in 

 water, but, as Plutarch said, enamelled in fire." But all these 

 attachments, which, like morning breezes, merely ruffle the 

 placid waters, as the years pass on culminate with many at the 

 seaside in that true and lasting devotion whose flower is mar- 

 riage. Thenceforth the sea is sacred in the husband's eyes. 

 * Essays : No. V. Love. 



