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CHAPTER XXXI.
"I mean that willing sense of the insufficingness of the self for itself which predisposes a generous nature to see, in the total being of another, the supplement and completion of its own."
Coleridge.
Ah me! how poor, after all, is the boasted power of the writer!—his subject-words desert him at "His utmost need:" but rather be the fault on language itself; for how much is there of passionate feeling that could never yet be written or told! What form of speech may express the happiness of the one half-hour passed beside that lonely pool, which never before imaged a love-meeting so perfect in its affection?—the delicious silence broken by unconscious exclamations; the asking looks that question without a sound; the forgetfulness of past and future, as if life were centred in this one present and dearest dream. Let it pass unimaged, unless by memory. But happiness is like that fairy flower whose home and birth-place are the air, the most unstable of ele-
