And now, in bright Provençal bowers, A minstrel-knight am I: A gentle bosom on my own Throbs back its ecstasy; A cheek, as fair as the almond flowers, Thrills to my lips' reply!
I tread the fanes of wondrous Rome, Crowned with immortal bay, And myriads throng the Capitol To hear my lofty lay, While, sounding o'er the Tiber's foam, Their shoutings peal away!
Oh, triumph such as this were worth The poet's doom of pain, Whose hours are brazen on the earth, But golden in the brain: I close the starry gate of dreams, And walk the dust again!
That the truths arrived at by the unaccredited short road of "magnetism" had better be stripped of their technical phraseology, and set down as the gradual discoveries of science and experience, is a policy upon which acts many a sagacious believer in "clairvoyance." Doubtless, too, there is, here and there, a wise man, who is glad enough to pierce, with the eyes of an incredible agent, the secrets about him, and let the world give him credit, by whatever name they please, for the superior knowledge of which he silently takes advantage. I should be behind the time, if I had not sounded to the utmost of my ability and opportunity the depth of this new medium. I have tried it on grave things and trifles. If the unveiling which I am about to record were of more use to myself than to others, perhaps I should adopt the policy of which I have just spoken, and give the result, simply as my own shrewd lesson learned in reading the female heart. But the truths I unfold will instruct the few who need and can appreciate them, while the whole subject is not of general importance enough to bring down cavilers upon the credibility of their source. I thus get rid of a very detestable though sometimes necessary evil, ("_qui nescit dissimulare nescit vivere_," says the Latin sage,) that of shining by any light that is not absolutely my own.
I am a very plain man in my personal appearance--_so_ plain that a common observer, if informed that there was a woman who had a fancy for my peculiar type, would wonder that I was not thankfully put to rest for life as a seeker after love--a second miracle of the kind being a very slender probability. It is not in beauty that the taste for beauty alone resides, however. In early youth my soul, like the mirror of Cydippe, retained, with enamored fidelity, the image of female loveliness copied in the clear truth of its appreciation, and the passion for it had become, insensibly, the thirst of my life, before I thought of it as more than an intoxicating study. To be loved--myself beloved--by a creature made in one of the diviner moulds of woman, was, however, a dream that shaped itself into waking distinctness at last, and from that hour I took up the clogging weight of personal disadvantages, to which I had hitherto unconsciously been chained, and bore it heavily in the race which the well-favored ran as eagerly as I.