Experience has rude lessons, and we grow Like what we have been taught too late to know, And yet we hate ourselves for being so. - Letitia Elizabeth Landon

... Oh! burning are the drops
That wounded love will shed—like to the dew
Falling from off the poison tree, the blight
Still following the touch ;—ah ! other tears
Soften and bless—but these destroy the heart.

Did we not know this world to be but a place of trial — our bitter probation for another and for a better — how strange in its severity would seem the lot of genius in a woman. The keen feeling — the generous enthusiasm — the lofty aspiration — and the delicate perception — are given but to make the possessor unfitted for her actual position.

The influence of a woman's first love is felt on her whole after-existence: never can she dream such dream again. For a woman there is no second-love—youth, hope, belief, are all given to her first attachment; if unrequited, the heart becomes its own Prometheus, creative, ideal, but with the vulture preying upon it for ever.—If deceived, the whole poetry of life is gone; the very essence of poetry is belief, and how can she, whose sweet eager credulity has once learnt the bitter truth—that its reliance was in vain, how can she ever believe again?