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!"