Though she be called "a fine woman" still, men of all ages will turn from her to dote upon an empty-headed debutante. Her comprehension and sympathy, her wit and her learning are less enthralling than the vapid babblings of red-cheeked misses just out of pinafores. Her heart is as young as ever; she knows herself capable of a finer, nobler passion and tenderness than the girl can dream of, yet the selfish, egotistic emotions of the self-confident chit awake a rapture that would be dulled by the richest warmth she could give.
"Age, I do abhor thee: Youth, I do adore thee; O, my love, my love is _young_!"
That she in her turn elbowed the preceding generation from its place comforts her not at all. Oh, for again one hour only of the splendid domination of youth--one rich instant of the power to intoxicate!...
There is nothing for it but to keep such things to one's self, and jog on quietly and respectably to the end. One has had one's turn.
That mad girl Spring has passed up this way With a hole in her pockets, For here lies her money all strewn in the grass-- Broad dandelion ducats.
She'll be needing this wealth ere the end of the year For a warm winter gown, Though now she's content with a breast-knot of buds And a violet crown.
She heard in the green blooming depths of the wood The voice of a dove, And she dropped all these flowering coins as she ran To meet summer and love.
'Twill not serve you to gather from out her wild path All your two hands can hold-- Only youth and the Spring may buy kisses and mirth With this frail fairy gold.
There has been great recrudescence of the Essay of late--none of it very important, I take the liberty of thinking. We moderns have lost the trick of it. All of us, at least, but Stevenson, and he hardly seems a modern, so closely is he related to the great classics, with his inheritance of the Grand Style, like the _bel canto_, now a lost art. And yet the Essay is a great temptation. Doubtless not one of all those who go down into the ink-bottle with pens has quite escaped its seduction. Generally it is, I suspect, merely an outcropping of the somewhat too widely known need of the artistic nature for "self-expression" in more definite terms than ordinary work permits.