pleasure, in the tumults of ambition, in the blaze of a licentious
court, or by the rude tents of a barbarous host,--never, my buried love,
had I forgotten thee! That remembrance, had no other cause existed,
would have led me to God. Every night, in whatever toils or whatever
objects, whatever failures or triumphs, the day had been consumed; every
night before I laid my head upon my widowed and lonely pillow,--I had
knelt down and lifted my heart to Heaven, blending the hopes of that
Heaven with the memory and the vision of Isora. Prayer had seemed to me
a commune not only with the living God, but with the dead by whom His
dwelling is surrounded. Pleasant and soft was it to turn to one
thought, to which all the holiest portions of my nature clung between
the wearying acts of this hard and harsh drama of existence. Even the
bitterness of Isora's early and unavenged death passed away when I
thought of the heaven to which she was gone, and in which, though I
journeyed now through sin and travail and recked little if the paths of
others differed from my own, I yet trusted with a solemn trust that I
should meet her at last. There was I to merit her with a love as
undying, and at length as pure, as her own. It was this that at the
stated hour in which, after my prayer for our reunion, I surrendered my
spirit to the bright and wild visions of her far, but /not impassable/
home,--it was this which for that single hour made all around me a
paradise of delighted thoughts! It was not the little earth, nor the
cold sky, nor the changing wave, nor the perishable turf,--no, nor the
dead wall and the narrow chamber,--which were around me then! No
dreamer ever was so far from the localities of flesh and life as I was
in that enchanted hour: a light seemed to settle upon all things around
me; her voice murmured on my ear, her kisses melted on my brow; I shut
my eyes, and I fancied that I beheld her.

Wherefore was this comfort? Whence came the spell which admitted me to