Godolphin, Volume 2. by Baron Edward Bulwer Lytton Lytton
page 41 of 67 (61%)
page 41 of 67 (61%)
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thought no labour worth the price of a single hour of pleasure and
enjoyment. For you, how joyfully will I renounce my code! For myself I could ask no honour: for you, I will labour for all. No toil shall be dry to me--no pleasure shall decoy. I will renounce my idle and desultory pursuits. I will enter the great public arena, where all who come armed with patience and with energy are sure to win. Constance, I am not without talents, though they have slept within me; say but the word, and you know not what they can produce." An irresolution in Constance was felt as a sympathy by Godolphin; he continued,-- "We are both desolate in the world, Constance; we are orphans--friendless, fortuneless. Yet both have made our way without friends, and commanded our associates, though without fortune. Does not this declare we have that within us which, when we are united, can still exalt or conquer our destiny? And we--we--alone in the noisy and contentious world with which we strive--we shall turn, after each effort, to our own hearts, and find there a comfort and a shelter. All things will bind us closer and closer to each other. The thought of our past solitude, the hope of our future objects, will only feed the fountain of our present love. And how much sweeter, Constance, will be honours to you, if we thus win them; sanctified as they will be by the sacrifices we have made; by the thought of the many hours in which we desponded, yet took consolation from each other; by the thought how we sweetened mortifications by sympathy, and made even the lowest successes noble by the endearing associations with which we allied them! How much sweeter to you will be such honours than those which you might command at once, but accompanied by a cold heart; rendered wearisome because won with ease and low because undignified by fame! Oh, Constance! am I not heard? Have not love, nature, sense, |
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