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At the same time, his more romantic association with Vanessa roused those instincts which he had scarcely known himself to be possessed of. His position was, therefore, most embarrassing. He hoped to end it when he left London and returned to Ireland; but fate was unkind to him in this, because Vanessa followed him.
"Grown old in politicks and wit, Caress'd by ministers of State, Of half mankind the dread and hate."* *Cadenus and Vanessa. And he felt that he deserved reward for what he had done for his party. He thought that he should have been made a bishop.
We, on the other hand, believe that she was the only woman Swift ever loved constantly, that he wished and meant to marry her, that he probably did marry her, but only when all hope of the old open-hearted confidence was gone forever, chiefly through his own fault, if partly through her jealous misconception of his relation to Vanessa, and that it was the sense of his own weakness, which admitted of no explanation tolerable to an injured woman, and entailed upon a brief folly all the consequences of guilt, that more than all else darkened his lonely decline with unavailing regrets and embittered it with remorseful self-contempt.
As his friend was an hospitable, open-hearted man, well beloved and largely acquainted, it happened one day that some gentlemen dropped in to dinner, who were strangers to Stella's situation; and as the poem of 'Cadenus and Vanessa' was then the general topic of conversation, one of them said, 'Surely that Vanessa must be an extraordinary woman that could inspire the Dean to write so finely upon her. Mrs.
The spiritual realm, whether of divine or earthly things, was a region closed to him, where he never set foot." On the side of friendship he must greatly have preferred Stella to Vanessa, and yet the latter assailed him on his weakest side on the side of his love of imperious domination. Vanessa hugged the fetters to which Stella merely submitted.
Many of these last are comparatively small at this elevation, and as yet almost unknown to science; but every now and then a familiar vanessa or papilio comes sailing past.
And Nature, who is kind to all her children, and never leaves the smallest and saddest of all her human failures without one little comfit of self-love at the bottom of his poor ragged pocket, Nature suggested to him that he had turned his sentence well; and he fell into a reverie, in which the old thoughts that were always hovering dust outside the doors guarded by Common Sense, and watching for a chance to squeeze in, knowing perfectly well they would be ignominiously kicked out again as soon as Common Sense saw them, flocked in pell-mell, misty, fragmentary, vague, half-ashamed of themselves, but still shouldering up against his inner consciousness till it warmed with their contact: John Wilkes's the ugliest man's in England saying, that with half-an-hour's start he would cut out the handsomest man in all the land in any woman's good graces; Cadenus old and savage leading captive Stella and Vanessa; and then the stray line of a ballad, "And a winning tongue had he," as much as to say, it is n't looks, after all, but cunning words, that win our Eves over, just as of old when it was the worst-looking brute of the lot that got our grandmother to listen to his stuff and so did the mischief.
Swift did not in any sense make love to her, though he gave her the somewhat fanciful name of "Vanessa"; but she, driven on by a high-strung, unbridled temperament, made open love to him. When he was about to return to Ireland, there came one startling moment when Vanessa flung herself into the arms of Swift, and amazed him by pouring out a torrent of passionate endearments.
Vanessa, meanwhile, in a Bayswater back street, was making out the weekly laundry list, attending bargain sales, and, in her more adventurous moments, trying new ways of cooking whiting. Occasionally she went to bridge parties, where, if the play was not illuminating, at least one learned a great deal about the private life of some of the Royal and Imperial Houses.
"And," I added "certain minor authors named Goldsmith, Sterne, Steele, and Samuel Lover." "And Bishop Berkeley, and Brinsley Sheridan, and Maria Edgeworth, and Father Prout," continued Salemina, "and certain great speech-makers like Burke and Grattan and Curran; and how delightful to visit all the places connected with Stella and Vanessa, and the spot where Spenser wrote the Faerie Queene."
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