How many a young person there must be who, dominated over by a maturer mind and personality, with attractions and conjurations of its own, shakes off the spell in after-times, and sees with amazement that the god, if not made of putty, yet is only common flesh and blood! How many a woman has waked, after years of marriage with the one idolized at the outset, to find that the idol had feet of clay! How many a man has married a doll, and by the slow process of disenchanting years has felt no surprise when at last he saw the sawdust. Yet they who find the demi-god of youth still a demi-god, when middle life has rubbed the cobwebs out of their eyes, when the high noon has dissipated those magnifying mists of morning, they who preserve their idols and find them and their informing spirits golden still, they who have no occasion to be reminded that there is such a thing as sawdust in the world -- how blessed are they, blest with the good fortune that is theirs, blessed even if it is illusion and they themselves are not wise enough to be aware of it!
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| The illusion that surrounds the dead with a halo is certainly a blessed one. |
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