He loved an ideal, revealed to him, as he thought, in the shape of the fair English girl; he worshipped his ideal through her, without a thought that he could be mistaken.

Happy man! Perhaps he had a better chance of going through life without any cruel revelation of his mistake than falls to the lot of most lovers, for she was surpassingly beautiful, and most good and true hearted.

But are not people always mistaken who think to find the perfect comprehended in the imperfect, the infinite enchained and made tangible in the finite?
Bah! The same old story, the same old vicious circle, the everlastingly recurring mathematical view of things that cannot be treated mathematically; the fruitless attempt to measure the harmonious circle of the soul by the angular square of the book.

What poor things our minds are, after all.

We have but one way of thinking derived from what we know, and we incontinently apply it to things of which we can know nothing, and then we quarrel with the result, which is a mere _reductio ad absurdum_, showing how utterly false and meagre are our hypotheses, premisses, and so-called axioms.