Andrew, knew love too well to write of it much, or to speak of it at all.
He had won his ideal as alone the ideal can be won; he never lost her:
she was with him always, because she had been unattainable. "There are
few," he says, "who have not, at one period of life, broken ties of love
and friendship, secret disappointments of the heart, to mourn over,--and
we know no book which recalls the memory of them more severely than
'Julia de Roubigne.'" He could not be very eager to recall them, he who
had so bitterly endured them, and because he had known and always knew
"l'amor che move 'l sol e l'altre stelle," a seal was on his lips, a
silence broken only by a caress of Di Vernon's.'
This apology we may make, if an apology be needed, for what modern
readers may think the meagreness of the love-passages in Scott. He does
not deal in embraces and effusions, his taste is too manly; he does not
dwell much on Love, because, like the shepherd in Theocritus, he has
found him an inhabitant of the rocks. Moreover, when Scott began
novel-writing, he was as old as Thackeray when Thackeray said that while
at work on a love-scene he blushed so that you would think he was going
into an apoplexy.
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