Full of dreams, and refinements, and intense abstractions, it was a love that seemed not homely enough for endurance, and of too rare a nature to hope for sympathy in return.
And so it was in his intercourse with Constance, both were continually disappointed.

"You do not feel this," said Constance.

"She cannot understand me," sighed Godolphin.
But we must not suppose--despite his refinements, and his reveries, and his love for the intellectual and the pure--that Godolphin was of a stainless character or mind.

He was one who, naturally full of decided and marked qualities, was, by the peculiar elements of our society, rendered a doubtful, motley, and indistinct character, tinctured by the frailties that leave us in a wavering state between vice and virtue.
The energies that had marked his boyhood were dulled and crippled in the indolent life of the world.

His wandering habits for the last few years--the soft and poetical existence of the South--had fed his natural romance, and nourished that passion for contemplation which the intellectual man of pleasure so commonly forms; for pleasure has a philosophy of its own--a sad, a fanciful, yet deep persuasion of the vanity of all things--a craving after the bright ideal-- "The desire of the moth for the star." Solomon's thirst for pleasure was the companion of his wisdom: satiety was the offspring of the one--discontent of the other.