one vast embrace in thankfulness that she had become incarnate, for me,
in a being that united all her charms and splendor, power, and
delights. I knelt on the stones and briers of the ruins without feeling
them and on the brink of precipices without perceiving them. I uttered
inarticulate words, which were lost in the sound of the noisy waters of
the lake; I strove to pierce the vaults of heaven, and to carry my song
of gratitude, and my ecstasy of joy, into the very presence of God. I
was no longer a man, I was a living hymn of praise, prayer, adoration,
worship of overflowing, speechless thankfulness. I felt an intoxication
of the heart, a madness of the soul; my body had lost the consciousness
of its materiality and I no longer believed in time, or space, or
death. The new life of love which had gushed forth in my heart gave me
the consciousness, the anticipated enjoyment, of the fulness of
immortality.




XVIII.


I was made aware of the flight of time by seeing the meridian sun
striking on the summit of the Abbey walls. I came down the hill through
the woods bounding from rock to rock, and from tree to tree. My heart
beat as though it would burst. As I approached the little inn, I saw
the stranger in a sloping meadow behind the house. She was seated at
the foot of a sunny wall, against which the inhabitants of the place
had piled a few stones. Her white dress shone out on the verdant
meadow, and the shade of a haystack screened her face from the sun. She
was reading in a little book that lay open on her lap, and every now