VII. SARATOGA. "Wilt thou be a nun, Sophie? Nothing but a nun? Is it not a better thing With thy friends to laugh and sing? To be loved and sought? To be wooed and-won? Dost thou love the shadow, Sophie, AUGUST. ROMANCE is the necessary association of wateringplaces, because they are the haunts of youth and beauty seeking pleasure. When on some opaline May-day you drive out from Naples to Baiæ, the Saratoga of old Rome, and in the golden light of the waning afternoon drink Falernian while you look upon the vineyards where it ripened for Horace, your fancy is thronged with the images of romance, and you could listen to catch some echo of a long, silent love-song, lingering in the air. It is a kind of sentimentality inseparable from the spot-a pensive reverie into which few men are loth to fall; for its atmosphere is "the light that never was on sea or land." Yet romance, like a ghost, eludes touching. It is always where you were, not where you are. The interview or the conversation was prose at the time, but it is poetry in memory. Thus persons of poetic feeling speak of people and events as if they were the figures of a romance, and are laughed at for seeing everything through their imagination. But why is it not as pleasant to see through imagination as through scepticism? Why, because people are bad, should I be faithless of the virtue of a beautiful woman? Life is the best thing we can possibly make of it. I sit dull and dismal and heavy, if a man loses his temper; it is glowing with promise and satisfaction, if he is not ashamed of his emotions. Young America is very anxious to be a man of the world. He has heard that in England a gentleman is a being of sublime indifference, who has exhausted all varieties of experience who has, in fact, opened the oyster of the world. So Young America cultivates nonchalance with the ladies, and cannot help it if he does know everything that is worth knowing. To every man of thought and perception he is the travestie of a man, whose social life is an injustice and an insult to every woman. He does not see that indifference is satiety-that it is the weakness of a man whom circumstances have mastered, and not the sensitive calmness, like a lake's surface, of profound and digested experience. What is the charm of a belle but her purely natural manners? And they are charming, not in themselves, but because they harmonize with her nature and character. Yet if another person imitates her manners in the hope of being a belle, the result is at once ludicrous and painful. But such musings, however suggested by the place, I fancy you will consider barren as the sand in which Saratoga lies. The romance of a watering-place, like other romance, always seems past when you are there. Here at Saratoga, when the last polka is polked, and the last light in the ball-room is extinguished, you saunter along the great piazza, with the "good night" of beauty yet trembling upon your lips, and meet some old habitué, or even a group of them, smoking in lonely arm-chairs, and meditating the days departed. The great court is dark and still. The waning moon is rising beyond the trees, but does not yet draw their shadows, moonlight-mosaics, upon the lawn. There are no mysterious couples moving in the garden, not H |