sweetest illusions of my youth. I feel suddenly grown old. Never more will the flowers seem so lovely, or the stars so bright. Never more shall I dwell on Erminia's deep and enduring love for the unhappy Tancred, and think that I too could so have loved. Ah! in what now can I believe, when I may not even trust my own heart?" Here, at least, we have unadulterated sentiment, with no traces in it of that "mean and jocular life" which Emerson so deeply scorned, and for which the light-minded readers of to-day have ventured to express their cheerful and shameless preference.
Emotional literature, reflecting as it does the tastes and habits of a dead past, should not stand trial alone before the cold eyes of the mocking present, where there is no sympathy for its weakness and no clue to its identity. A happy commonplaceness is now acknowledged to be, next to brevity of life, man's best inheritance; but in the days when all the virtues and vices flaunted in gala costume, people were hardly prepared for that fine simplicity which has grown to be the crucial test of art. Love, friendship, honor, and courage were as real then as now, but they asserted themselves
