The Mysteries of the Court of London — page 158: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

EDGAR AND CHRISTIAN 135 bank, we will have a post-chaise-and-four in waiting, and if success do not crown our enterprise, I shall never have been more mistaken in all my life.” Our hero and the lieutenant continued to deliberate upon the details of their plan until the friendly juggler returned to the hotel. He received his instructions, together with a liberal reward for the faithful execution of his mission of that day, and the man took his departure infinitely delighted with the lucrative employment which he had thus temporarily found. In the same way that love at one time feeds itself with the wildest hopes, so at another does it torture itself with a thousand anxieties. Yet, paradoxical though the phrases may seem, love’s hopes are ever interwoven with mistrust, and its apprehensions are permeated with beams of hope- fulness. Love hopes on in the face of despair itself, and it sometimes despairs when it ought to hope. It is a passion which in its association with other sentiments is made up of contradictions; but as the river receives all confluent streamlets and absorbs those varied and insignificant waters in its own rolling volume, so does the tide of love’s passion flow onward and onward, amalgamating in one flood the different feelings and discrepant emotions which become its undercurrents, and with their conflicting elements serve to swell and give a forward impetus to the whole. And then, too, this river which we are metaphorically taking as an illustration of love’s progress pursues its course at one time amidst dark, frowning rocks, blackening its surface with their shadows, and shutting out the sun of hope; but at another time it meanders through smiling meads, where its banks are garlanded with flowers, and where its trans- parent waters shine brilliantly, with the sunbeams playing upon its bosom and kissing all its gentle ripples. For well has the poet said that ‘‘ the course of true love never did run smooth,” and if we take the passion from its first inception in the human breast, trace its progress, and study its track, until it at length bears Hymen’s bark exult- ingly upon its bosom, we shall find that there is no more appropriate similitude than that which is furnished by the course of some of earth’s proudest rivers. For is not love at first like a little silver stream in the profundities of a wilder- ness, always flowing and swelling onward, though not always CORNICLOO© cS (CO)