pronounced.

These two young lives, so fresh, so beautiful; these beings, in many
things such antipodes, so utterly dissimilar in person, so unlike, yet
like; their whole acquaintance a glance on a crowded street and these
few hours of meeting,--looked into one another's eyes, and felt their
whole nature set each to each, as the vast tide "of the bright, rocking
ocean sets to shore at the full moon."

These things are possible. Friendship is excellent, and friendship may
be called love; but it is not love. It may be more enduring and placidly
satisfying in the end; it may be better, and wiser, and more prudent,
for acquaintance to beget esteem, and esteem regard, and regard
affection, and affection an interchange of peaceful vows: the result, a
well-ordered life and home. All this is admirable, no doubt; an owl is a
bird when you can get no other; but the love born of a moment, yet born
of eternity, which comes but once in a lifetime, and to not one in a
thousand lives, unquestioning, unthinking, investigating nothing,
proving nothing, sufficient unto itself,--ah, that is divine; and this
divine ecstasy filled these two souls.

Unconsciously. They did not define nor comprehend. They listened to the
sea where they sat, and felt tears start to their eyes, yet knew not
why. They were silent, and thought they talked; or spoke, and said
nothing. They danced; and as he held her hand and uttered a few words,
almost whispered, the words sounded to the listening ear like a part of
the music to which they kept time. They saw a multitude of people, and
exchanged the compliments of the evening, yet these people made no more
impression upon their thoughts than gossamer would have made upon their
hands.