exhaled the aspirations of a long life. I felt alarmed. "Are you in
pain?" I inquired, sadly. "No," she said; "it was not pain, it was
thought." "What were you thinking of so intensely?" I rejoined. "I was
thinking," she answered, "that if God were at this instant to strike
all nature with immobility; if the sun were to remain thus, its disk
half hidden behind those dark firs, which seem the fringed lashes of
the eye of heaven; if light and shade remained thus blended in the
atmosphere, this lake in its same transparency, this air as balmy,
these two shores forever at the same distance from this boat, the same
ray of ethereal light on your brow, the same look of pity reflected
from your eyes in mine, this same fulness of joy in my heart,--I should
comprehend what I have never comprehended since I first began to think,
or to dream." "What?" said I, anxiously. "Eternity in one instant, and
the Infinite in one sensation!" she exclaimed, half leaning over the
edge of the boat, as if to look at the water and to spare me the
embarrassment of an answer. I was awkward enough to reply by some
commonplace phrase of vulgar gallantry, which unfortunately rose to my
lips, instead of the chaste and ineffable adoration which inundated my
heart. It was something to the effect that such happiness would not
suffice me, if it were not the promise of another and a greater
felicity. She understood me but too well, and blushed, on my account
rather than her own. She turned to me with all the emotion of profaned
purity depicted on her face, and in accents as tender, but more solemn
and heartfelt than any that had yet fallen from her lips: "You have
given me pain," she said in a low voice; "come hither, nearer to me,
and listen; I know not if what I feel for you, and what you appear to
feel for me, be what is termed love, in the obscure and confused
language of this world in which the same words serve to express
feelings that bear no resemblance to each other, save in the sound they
yield upon the lips of man. I do not wish to know it; and you--oh, I