LOVE’S INFLUENCE.

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BY ENNA DUVAL.

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Thus not all love, nor every mode of love is beautiful or worthy of commendation, but that alone which excites us to love worthily. If any one seeks the friendship of another, believing him to be virtuous, for the sake of becoming better through such intercourse and affection, and is deceived, his friend turning out to be worthless, and far from the possession of virtue; yet it is honorable to have been so deceived. For such an one seems to have submitted to a kind of servitude because he would endure any thing for the sake of becoming more virtuous and wise: a disposition of mind eminently beautiful. So much, although unpremeditated, is what I have to deliver on the subject of Love, O Phædrus. Shelley’s Translation of the Symposium of Plato.

In looking back upon my school-girl friendships, I always select Meta Hallowell as the most interesting, and the most satisfactory to dwell upon. The influences of friendship, love, society and time, have made the most beautiful developments in her character. She was a merry, light-hearted creature; but was more remarkable at school for an affectionate disposition, and a refined and delicate taste, than for any quick perception of intellect, or even proper application. She was a butterfly, flying from one thing to another in her studies, just as the interest of the moment led her; acting as if all the duties of life were merely for amusement. I used to look at her and wonder silently how she would ever be able to endure any trouble that might come upon her in the future; she seemed so volatile, so delicate, so totally unfitted to come in contact with the thousand and one struggles and trials that spring up in every one’s life-path. “Surely,” I would say to myself, “trouble would overwhelm such a frail spirit, or harden it, and deprive it of its refined beauty.” But I have always been the very worst person in the world to judge of character; and I never could prophesy in that knowing manner, that so many wise ones do, on the effects that certain influences or circumstances would produce on different natures. Nor has experience done me any good. I am no better judge now, and although events have taken place in my own life and in my own circle that would have enlightened most persons, I am no brighter, no quicker; and I make just as many blunders as I did when I played with dreamy philosophy and the study of character at seventeen.

But I commenced with Meta Hallowell not with myself. Meta was beautiful in person as well as in spirit. She had a graceful, willowy figure, delicately developed; a sparkling, yes, a brilliant face, with eyes that were flashing or melting, just as she felt gay or sentimental; and a finely-shaped mouth, whose lips trembled with every shade of feeling, and around it hung the expression of intuitive refinement and delicacy that always hovers around the mouth if there be any refinement in a person’s nature. Then her laugh was the most musical thing in the world, and her voice the sweetest of all voices. This sounds enthusiastic, but Meta Hallowell was and is a subject worthy of enthusiasm. She has never worn out; she is better, lovelier and purer than when I first loved her in my school-days.