susceptible of pleasurable emotion. The overflowing warmth of her heart, by
making love a plant of deep root and stately growth, had attuned her whole
soul to the reception of happiness, when she found in Raymond all that
could adorn love and satisfy her imagination. But if the sentiment on which
the fabric of her existence was founded, became common place through
participation, the endless succession of attentions and graceful action
snapt by transfer, his universe of love wrested from her, happiness must
depart, and then be exchanged for its opposite. The same peculiarities of
character rendered her sorrows agonies; her fancy magnified them, her
sensibility made her for ever open to their renewed impression; love
envenomed the heart-piercing sting. There was neither submission, patience,
nor self-abandonment in her grief; she fought with it, struggled beneath
it, and rendered every pang more sharp by resistance. Again and again the
idea recurred, that he loved another. She did him justice; she believed
that he felt a tender affection for her; but give a paltry prize to him who
in some life-pending lottery has calculated on the possession of tens of
thousands, and it will disappoint him more than a blank. The affection and
amity of a Raymond might be inestimable; but, beyond that affection,
embosomed deeper than friendship, was the indivisible treasure of love.
Take the sum in its completeness, and no arithmetic can calculate its
price; take from it the smallest portion, give it but the name of parts,
separate it into degrees and sections, and like the magician's coin, the
valueless gold of the mine, is turned to vilest substance. There is a
meaning in the eye of love; a cadence in its voice, an irradiation in its
smile, the talisman of whose enchantments one only can possess; its spirit
is elemental, its essence single, its divinity an unit. The very heart and
soul of Raymond and Perdita had mingled, even as two mountain brooks that
join in their descent, and murmuring and sparkling flow over shining
pebbles, beside starry flowers; but let one desert its primal course, or be
dammed up by choaking obstruction, and the other shrinks in its altered