its golden pleasures exhausted? Had I seen Rome? Had I read Milton?
Had I heard Mozart? No. St. Peter's, the "Paradise Lost," the divine
melodies of "Don Giovanni," all alike were as yet unrevealed to me,
and not more through the accidents of my position than through the
necessity of my yet imperfect sensibilities. Raptures there might be
in arrear; but raptures are modes of _troubled_ pleasure. The peace,
the rest, the central security which belong to love that is past all
understanding,--these could return no more. Such a love, so
unfathomable,--such a peace, so unvexed by storms, or the fear of
storms,--had brooded over those four latter years of my infancy, which
brought me into special relations to my elder sister; she being at
this period three years older than myself. The circumstances which
attended the sudden dissolution of this most tender connection I will
here rehearse. And, that I may do so more intelligibly, I will first
describe that serene and sequestered position which we occupied in
life. [1]

Any expression of personal vanity, intruding upon impassioned records,
is fatal to their effect--as being incompatible with that absorption
of spirit and that self-oblivion in which only deep passion originates
or can find a genial home. It would, therefore, to myself be exceedingly
painful that even a shadow, or so much as a _seeming_ expression of
that tendency, should creep into these reminiscences. And yet, on the
other hand, it is so impossible, without laying an injurious restraint
upon the natural movement of such a narrative, to prevent oblique
gleams reaching the reader from such circumstances of luxury or
aristocratic elegance as surrounded my childhood, that on all accounts
I think it better to tell him, from the first, with the simplicity of
truth, in what order of society my family moved at the time from which
this preliminary narrative is dated. Otherwise it might happen that,