Anonymous

A summer amour

The thorns which often picks us most

Are found 'moung sweetest flowers.

Friend Clara:

An incident in my boyish life tonight passes before me in all the tinting of a panoramic view; and as my thoughts run back over the checkered pathway of forty years, which has sprinkled my hair with gray, filled my life with thorns and orange blossoms, to a month that has left its imprint on my whole life, I wish that I possessed the power to reproduce the picture in all its colors and do justice to the work which, at your request, I undertake to-night. I regret that the favor you ask is one which compels me to write of myself. To a modest man, lacking that phrenological enlargement that as a rule in men and women predominates to such a lamentable degree, the position is embarrassing; and in the perusal of this I trust your eye will rest on this unpleasant character as little as possible.

I was born neath a warm sun and southern skies, where the air was freighted with blended odor of the magnolia and jasmine that heightened the senses; where everything had its bud and blossom almost at its birth; where the dreamy languor of the voluptuary seemed inherent in all, where even in those which here in the North would be termed children, the sexual spark only waited for contact to flame up in its power; where girls where mothers at thirteen and grandmas at thirty; but up to my eleventh year I had known only books and sketching; a sweet-tempered, linen-dressed boy, who lived out of the sunshine and ignored the innocent deviltries of youth; who looked upon girls as horrid; whose life was rounded by a pony, books, pictures, and the flowers in the conservatory. But changes for good or evil take place in every life. It came to mine; and on that sweet-sighing summer day in my twelfth year, when Cupid threw apart the silken curtains, revealing beauties of which I had not even dreamed, my hand lost its cunning; to books I said farewell and ambition was dead. That was a day of fate. How bitterly have I cursed it since; how cursed her, who snatched me from my little heaven with its delightful anticipations and chaperoned me through the hot-house of passion; where every beautiful flower was filled with a subtle poison which raked the nerves, sapped the life, and deadened the brain. My introduction to the pleasures and mysteries that have ever been associated with the couch of love — the keen relish for which has blasted the family hearthstone and overthrown empires — was not entrusted to a novice; no timid simpering girl, taking her first steps toward the realization of the anticipation of forbidden pleasures, but to a woman; a woman of thirty, who being an apt pupil under the skillful manipulations and teachings of a husband for a term of years, had herself become a preceptor in all those delicate points that surrounded and amour with such delights and rosy tints. how plainly do I see her to-night! How much keener my appreciation of the wonderful piece of anatomy that time only still deeper imprints upon my memory; the standard, by which from that time all female perfections and loveliness has been gauged. Ah! She is before me again, and this time unveiled. Look at her! Is she not beautiful? Note the poise of her head, from which her glinted, golden hair falls in such a wealth. See those amber eyes; those wonderfully chiseled lips, so red, pulpy, and moist; her fair cheeks tinted by their reflection. Her shoulders — how perfectly and exquisitely molded — rounded with the same finish of her beautiful swelling globes, so daintily pinked and tipped. What belly, back and hips ever had the graceful curves of thine? And you! Rounded arms, white swelling thighs, and full-dimpled knees (in your warm, fond pressure of years ago I feel you again to-night) was the mold broken with your completion?

Gone? Yes! Only in memory now

We all of things

For the first time taste;

Whether sorrow, pain, or bliss.