  In truth, there is nothing on earth which more elevates a man in his own opinion than love, that love whose vast and conquering influence gives light to the heart, and gives it at once happiness and confusion. Can we be surprised if, when Don Juan hoped to appease by love the passions which rent his breast, that the devil spread a net for him? It was he who inspired Don Juan with the thought that by love and the society of woman we may accomplish on earth those celestial promises which we bear written in the deepest recesses of our hearts, that intense desire which from our earliest days brings us most closely to heaven. The principal difference Mr. Dwight makes in his rendering of this passage of Hoffman’s is, that where the German, in a very old-fashioned manner, attributes Don Juan’s wickedness to the influence of the Spirit of Evil, Mr. Dwight, by some slight of hand, metamorphoses the Passion of Love into an evil demon, and then gives a fling, as he would express it, at the religious discipline of the times to which he applies the very lucid epithet, “suppressive moralism.” We wish we had some of that “suppressive moralism” at the present day to exercise a little wholesome discipline over the authors of this |
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