Actor and spectator both, the two characters were so intimately blended together in that odd composition that they formed an inseparable unity, and it was impossible to say that one of them was less genuine than the other.

With one element, he could coldly appraise the Faery's intellectual capacity, note with some surprise that she could be on occasion "most interesting and amusing," and then continue his use of the trowel with an ironical solemnity; while, with the other, he could be overwhelmed by the immemorial panoply of royalty, and, thrilling with the sense of his own strange elevation, dream himself into a gorgeous phantasy of crowns and powers and chivalric love.

When he told Victoria that "during a somewhat romantic and imaginative life, nothing has ever occurred to him so interesting as this confidential correspondence with one so exalted and so inspiring," was he not in earnest after all?
When he wrote to a lady about the Court, "I love the Queen--perhaps the only person in this world left to me that I do love," was he not creating for himself an enchanted palace out of the Arabian Nights, full of melancholy and spangles, in which he actually believed?
Victoria's state of mind was far more simple; untroubled by imaginative yearnings, she never lost herself in that nebulous region of the spirit where feeling and fancy grow confused.

Her emotions, with all their intensity and all their exaggeration, retained the plain prosaic texture of everyday life.

And it was fitting that her expression of them should be equally commonplace.