Perhaps Miranda wants to read the fairy tale over again, and is not satisfied with my poor records of it. That may be the reason why she wants those letters back. It can hardly be any common reason, such as actuates common lovers when they make a like demand. She knows how I reverence the memory of our dream, and I think she is almost as proud to have dreamed it as I am.
We are not bitter or jealous toward each other, but, on the contrary, each of us is glad that the other is so happy with--some one else. Such sorrow as remains to us is the abstract, wistful sorrow which natures, such as ours--and O Miranda, how alike we were!--feel at the passing of any beautiful thing. The pathos of “_The grass withereth, the flower fadeth_”....
Ah! Miranda, how can we confidently complete that solemn sentence, when so seemingly everlasting a thing as our love has passed away? If that is gone, can there really be anything in the universe that endureth forever!
I suppose that it is the humiliated sense of this transitoriness of what had seemed an immortal feeling that makes men and women who have loved and lost each other, as Miranda and I, return those letters, which have thus come to seem the ludicrously earnest records of an illusion.
The two people feel that they have been tricked into these solemn utterances of the heart, as if Life had been playing a game with them, which they, unsuspecting, had taken seriously. They feel a little silly, as one does when some jocular friend, as we say, takes us in with some mock-serious story. We sit, attentive and eager, while he talks, and believe every word, and then suddenly the stealing smile upon his face tells us that we have been fooled. So we sit and listen to Love telling his old tale, as if he had never told it before, with such lit young eyes and such irresistible persuasion; and then, suddenly--there comes the smile stealing over his face, and we look at each other and know that we have been fooled.
This is not my view of the matter, but I conceive that it is the view of those who, like Miranda, wish to obliterate the records of an old dream. For my part, the fact of a feeling passing away is nothing against the reality of that feeling. All feelings must sooner or later pass away: