A word from Lady Ellinor, a frank smile from him, the rival, one last,
last glance from the soft eyes of Fanny, and then Solitude rushed upon
me,--rushed as something visible, palpable, overpowering. I felt it in
the glare of the sunbeam, I heard it in the breath of the air; like a
ghost it rose there,--where she had filled the space with her presence
but a moment before! A something seemed gone from the universe forever;
a change like that of death passed through my being; and when I woke, to
feel that my being lived again, I knew that it was my youth and its
poet-land that were no more, and that I had passed, with an unconscious
step, which never could retrace its way, into the hard world of
laborious man!