this fairy land? What was the source of the hope and the rapture and
the delusion? Was it not the deep certainty that /Isora yet existed/;
that her spirit, her nature, her love were preserved, were inviolate,
were the same? That they watched over me yet, that she knew that in
that hour I was with her, that she felt my prayer, that even then she
anticipated the moment when my soul should burst the human prison-house
and be once more blended with her own?

What! and was this to be no more? Were those mystic and sweet
revealings to be mute to me forever? Were my thoughts of Isora to be
henceforth bounded to the charnel-house and the worm? Was she indeed
/no more/? /No more/, oh, intolerable despair! Why, there was not a
thing I had once known, not a dog that I had caressed, not a book that I
had read, which I could know that I should see /no more/, and, knowing,
not feel something of regret. No more! were we, indeed, parted forever
and forever? Had she gone in her young years, with her warm affections,
her new hopes, all green and unwithered at her heart, at once into dust,
stillness, ice? And had I known her only for one year, one little year,
to see her torn from me by a violent and bloody death, and to be left a
mourner in this vast and eternal charnel, without a solitary consolation
or a gleam of hope? Was the earth to be henceforth a mere mass conjured
from the bones and fattened by the clay of our dead sires? Were the
stars and the moon to be mere atoms and specks of a chill light, no
longer worlds, which the ardent spirit might hereafter reach and be
fitted to enjoy? Was the heaven--the tender, blue, loving heaven, in
whose far regions I had dreamed was Isora's home, and had, therefore,
grown better and happier when I gazed upon it--to be nothing but cloud
and air? and had the love which had seemed so immortal, and so
springing from that which had not blent itself with mortality, been but
a gross lamp fed only by the properties of a brute nature, and placed in