'Farewell, Scythrop,' she repeated, 'you will never see me
again.'
'Never see you again, Marionetta?'
'I shall go from hence to-morrow, perhaps to-day; and before we meet
again, one of us will be married, and we might as well be dead, you
know, Scythrop.'
The sudden change of her voice in the last few words, and the burst
of tears that accompanied them, acted like electricity on the
tender-hearted youth; and, in another instant, a complete
reconciliation was accomplished without the intervention of words.
There are, indeed, some learned casuists, who maintain that love has
no language, and that all the misunderstandings and dissensions of
lovers arise from the fatal habit of employing words on a subject to
which words are inapplicable; that love, beginning with looks, that
is to say, with the physiognomical expression of congenial mental
dispositions, tends through a regular gradation of signs and symbols
of affection, to that consummation which is most devoutly to be
wished; and that it neither is necessary that there should be, nor
probable that there would be, a single word spoken from first to
last between two sympathetic spirits, were it not that the arbitrary
institutions of society have raised, at every step of this very simple
process, so many complicated impediments and barriers in the shape
of settlements and ceremonies, parents and guardians, lawyers,
Jew-brokers, and parsons, that many an adventurous knight (who, in
order to obtain the conquest of the Hesperian fruit, is obliged to
fight his way through all these monsters), is either repulsed at the
onset, or vanquished before the achievement of his enterprise: and
such a quantity of unnatural talking is rendered inevitably necessary
through all the stages of the progression, that the tender and
volatile spirit of love often takes flight on the pinions of some of
the [Greek: epea pteroenta], or _winged words_ which are pressed into
his service in despite of himself.
Pages:
55
56
57
58
59
60
61
62
63
64
65
66
67
68
69
70
71
72
73
74
75
76
77
78
79