Chapter XI: The Honeymoon

When the fretful stir
Unprofitable, and the fever of the world
Have hung upon the beatings of my heart,
How oft in spirit have I turned to thee,
O sylvan Wye! thou wanderer through the woods!
WORDSWORTH.

Mira queste mine
E le carte, e le tete, e i marmi, e i templi,
Pensa qual terra premi; e se destarti
Non può la luce di cotanti esempli,
Che stai? Levati e parti.
LEOPARDI.

Julius and Rose were married, and a brighter day never shone upon our island than that which saw these two admirable creatures united.

Vyner's heart was heavy as he gave her away; for although he had the highest opinion of Julius, and thought the match in every way an excellent one, yet Rose was the only child he had now at home with him; and his affection, rejected by his wife, had turned itself once more towards his children.

They set off for a wedding tour, down the Wye into Wales. Who shall depict their silent, deep, unspeakable happiness, as they felt themselves now for ever united? Words have no power of expressing such feelings: there is no standard to which to refer an experience which transcends all former experience. Either the reader has felt this bliss; or he will, some day, feel it. To his own experience I must refer him.

Everything then has a certain newness; yet everything comes as such a matter of course! All emotions glide through the soul with such a soft sure pace, that they excite no surprise even by their novelty. The lovers "feel as if they had been married years;" and yet a curious sense of novelty is always present. They do not feel what they expected to feel; yet are they not surprised. In fact, they are all feeling; all deep, vivid, unspeakable emotion. Hand clasped in hand, lip pressed to lip, eyes fixed on eyes, hours of silent and unbroken bliss pass swiftly on, as if the wide universe were shrunk into one spot, as if a whole eternity were not too great to be filled by that one passion.

Love is the intensest form of life. No wonder, then, that all human beings crave it; no wonder that we all feel a perennial interest in it, and that the look of tenderness we detect in its passage from one loved being to another, stirs strange memories in our hearts, and breaks like a smile over our souls; no wonder that in the cunning pages of the poet, we are fascinated by his pictured reflex of those feelings which belong to our common humanity!

Rose and Julius, so fitly formed to be united, each soul being, in Plato's language, the half of the other--the two souls rushing into a perfect one, and making a harmonious life between them: she so gay, witty, wild, frank, and gentle; he so grave, high-souled, earnest-minded, and so noble; she so beautiful, and he so honest--how could they fail to be happy?

To Tinterne's lovely scenes they at first repaired: a delicious spot, made for honeymoons, did not honeymoons fortunately make every place a paradise. The beauty of the spot was sweetly accordant with their minds; and they were delighted to alternate the admiration of nature with their adoration of each other. The sky seemed more blue, significant, and tender, after witnessing a kiss snatched amidst the tangled overgrowth of shrubs (with most unfeminine indifference, too, be it said, in passing, to the crumpling of bonnets!); and the sunny slopes looked still more verdant, as these lovers chased each other, like happy children, down them.

I am not going to betray any more of the secrets of those Eleusinian mysteries of love: the initiated will understand them; and they alone are fit to hear them.

How Julius and Rose admired Tinterne Abbey! Everybody does. Everybody remembers Wordsworth's magnificent lines; and it is the glorious privilege of poetry to open our eyes to the divinity of beauty which lies around us, and to confer on nature herself a splendour not her own. But lovers have no need of an hierophant: beauty to them is visible without the poet's aid; for they themselves are poets. And to our lovers the abbey was more exquisite than to any wayfarer's eye seeking only the picturesque.

"I am often puzzled," said Julius, as they stood within the majestic ruin, "to explain how it is that the proportion we so much admire in ancient and in Gothic architecture should be the endless despair of the moderns. With all our perfection of geometry and masonry, we are miserably behind our forefathers in the first principle of art: proportion. We build more comfortable houses; but we cannot build a palace, a temple, or a monument. The Comfortable we attain: our efforts after the Beautiful are singularly feeble and abortive. I suppose those writers are correct who place the cause of failure in the absence of that religious idea which animated the ancients. Certainly it seems as if we measured with the rule and compass, rather than with the mind: we aggregate materials, instead of incarnating an idea. We use the symbols of other times, and build churches and cathedrals with the columns and façades from sunny Greece, and the Gothic nave and cross from Germany and France; the flying buttress and the pointed arch side by side the architraves and pediments of Greece!"

"You will call me a little ignoramus," replied Rose; "but I can't help it: I prefer this abbey in its ruins to any perfect work of art. No doubt, in its original state it must have been very lovely; but look at it now! With no roof but heaven, no painted windows, but, instead, those charming glimpses of the hills around; and the chinks in the walls--the ruin with its moss and lichens, and the soft shadows thrown on this grassy pavement by the fragments of beauty which are still remaining--is not all this more beautiful than a work of art?"

Julius looked into her eyes and thought she was right; but what stopped his lips from replying, I leave to the reader's imagination: to my ears it had a very musical sound.

It was in vain they tried to be æsthetical and talk architecture; the time and mood were not made for it; and even the exquisite beauty which surrounded them could only draw from them fragmentary remarks. But if they did not express much, they felt a great deal.

It was not a spot to stand on without having the thoughts constantly withdrawn from the present to the past, of which it was a fragment. The mind would wander. On that very spot where they stood, had many a pious monk bowed himself down in prayer: asking, in the contrition of a weary spirit, for pardon and for courage. The faith which moved him has passed away, effaced beneath the giant march of time; the tessellated pavement no longer echoes the slow and heavy tread of monks, but has been broken and scattered, and has passed away with the faith it served; and, like that faith, exists only in broken fragments, curious amongst the weeds that have usurped its place. The painted windows

Richly dight,
Shedding a dim, religious light--

are no more: yon broken, crumbling shaft, springing up like an aspiring soul to the sky, no longer holds the glass

Diamonded with panes of quaint device,
Innumerable of stains and splendid dyes,
As are the tiger-moth's deep-damask'd wings.

Looking on these fragments which speak feelingly of the decay and change of all things, a soft melancholy would invade their minds.

"Everything then changes, is it so?" asked Rose.

"Everything," he replied, "but love; and that sustains the world."

Did I not say that lovers were poets? Here is Julius talking a language that would surprise himself, were it not the natural expression of his feelings. And Rose--instead of being witty and sparkling--Rose was throughout their tour so serious and sentimental, that no one would have recognised her; but she was intensely happy in her melancholy, and would not have changed it for all the gaieties in the world.

While I contemplate, not without a touch of envy, this change and its cause, it occurs to me, that as I am, unluckily, in no danger of falling into the error myself, I may, to follow my usual bent, moralize for a moment on this all interesting subject of honeymoons.

Rightly is the first month of marriage called a honeymoon: a period of unceasing sweetness, cloying at last upon the palled and exhausted palate, unless it have something higher and better upon which to rest than its mere sweetness. Before the year is out, the "happy pair" have, alas! too often found indifference succeed to this all-exacting, all-impatient passion; a consummation not easily to be avoided, but perhaps, to be delayed.

Many ingenious writers have tried their hands at a definition of love; may I not venture after them?

Love, in its commonest form, I take to be an _enthusiasm with which the mind intensifies and dignifies its desires_. Unhappily, in most cases, it is only a passing enthusiasm, dying away with the gratification of its desires; and dying, because not founded on lasting qualities; dying, because the sympathies are not involved, because the moral requirements are not responded to with the same facility as the physical. A love, whose root is in passion, and only in passion, cannot be supposed to survive the first ardour of that passion. It is only when above and beyond that passion, giving it force and perpetually renewing it as from a central fire, there exists what I should call a moral passion,--an intense moral desire,--that the love can be durable. The sensuous desire is violent but limited; the moral desire is infinite: the craving which soul feels for perfect communion with soul, and the infinite variety with which that desire is maintained, give to love its lustre and its immortality.

But how are we to distinguish between these two kinds of love? How is a man to know whether he loves in the complete and exalted manner last described, and not in the limited, instinctive, perishable manner? There, I confess, lies the mystery. Time alone can solve it. No man can well discriminate in his own case, and precisely for the reason that love is an enthusiasm, which not only intensifies, but also _dignifies_ his desires, so that in his eyes, his passion appears exalted, imperishable, unchangeable.

How many an unhappy wretch has awakened from a dream of passion, to find that after all it was only his enthusiasm which dignified the object which dignified his passion, and threw around it the lustre of immortal youth!

To think of this, to see in your own experience so many examples, is enough to make you register a vow that you will never--no never again fall in love. The vow may be registered; Love, who "laughs at locksmiths," knows the durability of such barriers as vows; and, looking down with the saucy pity of that imp Puck, exclaims--

Lord! what fools these mortals be!