Youthful passion is a giant. It overleaps all the dreams, and all the resolves of our better and quieter nature; and drives madly toward some wild issue, that lives only in its frenzy. How little account does passion take of goodness! It is not within the cycle of its revolution: it is below; it is tamer; it is older; it wears no wings.

And your proud heart flashing back to the memory of that sparkling eye which lighted your hope—full-fed upon the vanities of cloister learning, drives your soberer visions to the wind. As you recall those tones, so full of brilliancy and pride, the quiet virtues fade, like the soft haze upon a spring landscape driven westward by a swift, sea-born storm. The pulse bounds; the eyes flash; the heart trembles with its sharp springs. Hope dilates, like the eye, fed with swift blood leaping to the brain.

Again the image of Miss Dalton, so fine, so noble, so womanly, fills and bounds the Future. The lingering tears of grief drop away from your eye, as the lingering loves of boyhood drop from your scalding passion, or drip into clouds of vapor.

You listen to the calm, thoughtful advice of the father, with a deep consciousness of something stronger than his counsels seething in your bosom. The words of caution, of instruction, of guidance, fall upon your heated imagination like the night-dews upon the crater of an Ætna. They are beneficent and healthful for the straggling herbage upon the surface of the mountain, but they do not reach or temper the inner fires that are rolling their billows of flame beneath!

You drop hints from time to time, to those with whom you are most familiar, of some prospective change of condition. There is a new and cheerful interest in the building-plans of your neighbors,—a new and cheerful study of the principles of domestic architecture,—in which very elegant boudoirs, adorned with harps, hold prominent place; and libraries with gilt-bound books, very rich in lyrical and dramatic poetry; fine views from bay-windows; graceful pots of flowers; sleek-looking Italian greyhounds; cheerful sunlight; musical goldfinches chattering on the wall; superb pictures of princesses in peasant dresses; soft Axminster carpets; easy-acting bell-pulls; gigantic candelabrums; porcelain vases of classic shape; neat waiters in white aprons; luxurious lounges; and, to crown them all with the very height of your pride,—the elegant Laura, the mistress, and the guardian of your soul, moving amid the scene like a new Duchess of ValliÈre!

You catch chance sights here and there of the blue-eyed Madge: you see her in her mother's household, the earnest and devoted daughter,—gliding gracefully about her mother's cottage, the very type of gentleness and of duty. Yet withal there are sparks of spirit in her that pique your pride, lofty as it is. You offer flowers, which she accepts with a kind smile, not of coquetry, but of simplest thankfulness. She is not the girl to gratify your vanity with any half-show of tenderness. And if there lived ever in her heart an old girlish liking for the schoolboy Clarence, it is all gone before the romantic lover of the elegant Laura; or at most it lies in some obscure corner of her soul, never to be brought to light.

You enter upon the new pursuits, which your father has advised, with a lofty consciousness, not only of the strength of your mind, but of your heart. You relieve your opening professional study with long letters to Miss Dalton, full of Shakspearean compliments, and touched off with very dainty elaboration. And you receive pleasant, gossiping notes in answer,—full of quotations, but meaning very little.

Youth is in a grand flush, like the hot days of ending summer; and pleasant dreams thrall your spirit, like the smoky atmosphere that bathes the landscape of an August day. Hope rides high in the heavens, as when the summer sun mounts nearest to the zenith. Youth feels the fulness of maturity before the second season of life is ended; yet is it a vain maturity, and all the glow is deceitful. Those fruits that ripen in summer do not last. They are sweet; they are glowing with gold; but they melt with a luscious sweetness upon the lip. They do not give that strength and nutriment which will bear a man bravely through the coming chills of winter.

The last scene of summer changes now to the cobwebbed ceiling of an attorney's office. Books of law, scattered ingloriously at your elbow, speak dully to the flush of your vanities. You are seated at your side-desk, where you have wrought at those heavy, mechanic labors of drafting which go before a knowledge of your craft.

A letter is by you, which you regard with strange feelings: it is yet unopened. It comes from Laura. It is in reply to one which has cost you very much of exquisite elaboration. You have made your avowal of feeling as much like a poem as your education would admit. Indeed it was a pretty letter,—promising not so much the trustful love of an earnest and devoted heart, as the fervor of a passion which consumed you, and glowed like a furnace through the lines of your letter. It was a confession in which your vanity of intellect had taken very entertaining part, and in which your judgment was too cool to appear at all.

She must needs break out into raptures at such a letter; and her own will doubtless be tempered with even greater passion.

It is well to shift your chair somewhat, so that the clerks of the office may not see your emotion as you read. It would be silly to manifest your exuberance in a dismal, dark office of your instructing attorney. One sighs rather for woods, and brooks, and sunshine, in whose company the hopes of youth stretch into fulfilment.

We will look only at a closing passage:—

----"My friend Clarence will, I trust, believe me, when I say that his letter was a surprise to me. To say that it was very grateful, would be what my womanly vanity could not fail to claim. I only wish that I was equal to the flattering portrait which he has drawn. I even half fancy that he is joking me, and can hardly believe that my matronly air should have quite won his youthful heart. At least I shall try not to believe it; and when I welcome him one day, the husband of some fairy who is worthy of his love, we will smile together at the old lady who once played the Circe to his senses. Seriously, my friend Clarence, I know your impulse of heart has carried you away, and that in a year's time, you will smile with me at your old penchant for one so much your senior, and so ill-suited to your years, as your true friend, Laura."

----Magnificent Miss Dalton!

Read it again. Stick your knife in the desk:—tut!—you will break the blade! Fold up the letter carefully, and toss it upon your pile of papers. Open Chitty again;—pleasant reading is Chitty! Lean upon your hand—your two hands, so that no one will catch sight of your face. Chitty is very interesting,—how sparkling and imaginative!—what a depth and flow of passion in Chitty!

The office is a capital place—so quiet and sunny. Law is a delightful study—so captivating, and such stores of romance! And then those trips to the Hall offer such relief and variety,—especially just now. It would be well not to betray your eagerness to go. You can brush your hat a round or two, and take a peep into the broken bit of looking-glass over the wash-stand.

You lengthen your walk, as you sometimes do, by a stroll upon the Battery,—though rarely upon such a blustering November day. You put your hands in your pockets, and look out upon the tossing sea.

It is a fine sight—very fine. There are few finer bays in the world than New York Bay,—either to look at, or, for that matter, to sleep in. The ships ride up thickly, dashing about the cold spray delightfully; the little cutters gleam in the November sunshine like white flowers shivering in the wind.

The sky is rich—all mottled with cold, gray streaks of cloud. The old apple-women, with their noses frostbitten, look cheerful and blue. The ragged immigrants, in short trousers and bell-crowned hats, stalk about with a very happy expression, and very short-stemmed pipes; their yellow-haired babies look comfortably red and glowing. And the trees with their scant, pinched foliage have a charming, summer-like effect!

Amid it all the thoughts of the boudoir, and harpsichord, and goldfinches, and Axminster carpets, and sunshine, and Laura, are so very, very pleasant! How delighted you would be to see her married to the stout man in the red cravat, who gave her bouquets, and strolled with her on the deck of the steamer upon the St. Lawrence! What a jaunty, self-satisfied air he wore; and with what considerate forbearance he treated you—calling you once or twice Master Clarence! It never occurred to you before, how much you must be indebted to that pleasant, stout man.

You try sadly to be cheerful; you smile oddly; your pride comes strongly to your help, but yet helps you very little. It is not so much a broken heart that you have to mourn over, as a broken dream. You seem to see in a hundred ways, that had never occurred to you before, the marks of her superior age. Above all it is manifest in the cool and unimpassioned tone of her letter. Yet how kindly withal! It would be a relief to be angry.

New visions come to you, wakened by the broken fancy which has just now eluded your grasp. You will make yourself, if not old, at least gifted with the force and dignity of age. You will be a man, and build no more castles until you can people them with men! In an excess of pride you even take umbrage at the sex; they can have little appreciation of that engrossing tenderness of which you feel yourself to be capable. Love shall henceforth be dead, and you will live boldly without it.

----Just so, when some dark, eastern cloud-bank shrouds for a morning the sun of later August, we say in our shivering pride—the winter is come early! But God manages the seasons better than we; and in a day, or an hour perhaps, the cloud will pass, and the heavens glow again upon our ungrateful heads.

Well it is even so, that the passionate dreams of youth break up and wither. Vanity becomes tempered with wholesome pride; and passion yields to the riper judgment of manhood,—even as the August heats pass on, and over, into the genial glow of a September sun. There is a strong growth in the struggles against mortified pride; and then only does the youth get an ennobling consciousness of that manhood which is dawning in him, when he has fairly surmounted those puny vexations which a wounded vanity creates.

Now your heart is driven home; and that cherished place, where so little while ago you wore your vanities with an air that mocked even your grief, and that subdued your better nature, seems to stretch toward you over long miles of distance its wings of love, and to welcome back to the sister's and the father's heart, not the self-sufficient and vaunting youth, but the brother and son—the schoolboy Clarence. Like a thirsty child, you stray in thought to that fountain of cheer, and live again—your vanity crushed, your wild hope broken—in the warm and natural affections of the boyish home.

Clouds weave the Summer into the season of Autumn; and Youth rises from dashed hopes into the stature of a Man.