228 PRÆTERITA-I

take me with her to pay a visit in a convent; but I suppose felt it would be too cruel to leave me behind. The young ladies were allowed a chat with us in the parlour, and invited (with acceptance) to spend their vacations always at Herne Hill. And so began a second æra of that part of my life which is not “worthy of memory,”¹ but only of the “Guarda e Passa.”²

There was some solace during my autumnal studies in thinking that she was really in England, really over there,-I could see the sky over Chelmsford from my study window,-and that she was shut up in a convent and couldn’t be seen by anybody, or spoken to, but by nuns; and that perhaps she wouldn’t quite like it, and would like to come to Herne Hill again, and bear with me a little.

255. I wonder mightily now what sort of a creature I should have turned out, if at this time Love had been with me instead of against me; and instead of the distracting and useless pain, I had had the joy of approved love, and the untellable, incalculable motive of its sympathy and praise.

It seems to me such things are not allowed in this world. The men capable of the highest imaginative passion are always tossed on fiery waves by it: the men who find it smooth water, and not scalding, are of another sort. My father’s second clerk, Mr. Ritchie, wrote unfeelingly to his colleague, bachelor Henry, who would not marry for his mother’s and sister’s sakes, “If you want to know what happiness is, get a wife, and half a dozen children, and come to Margate.” But Mr. Ritchie remained all his life nothing more than a portly gentleman with gooseberry eyes, of the Irvingite persuasion.

There must be great happiness in the love-matches of the typical English squire. Yet English squires make their happy lives only a portion for foxes.³

¹ [See the full title of Præterita.]

² [Inferno, iii. 51.]

³ [Psalms lxiii. 10.]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]