reluctantly allows to the machinery of poets, and science casts aside into
the mouldy lumber-room of obsolete superstition.

Rousing my mind from enigmas impossible to solve, it was with intense
and yet most melancholy satisfaction that I turned to the image of Lilian,
rejoicing, though with a thrill of awe, that the promise so mysteriously
conveyed to my senses had, hereto, been already fulfilled,--Margrave had
left the town; Lilian was no longer subjected to his evil fascination.
But an instinct told me that that fascination had already produced an
effect adverse to all hope of happiness for me. Lilian's love for myself
was gone. Impossible otherwise that she--in whose nature I had always
admired that generous devotion which is more or less inseparable from the
romance of youth--should have never conveyed to me one word of consolation
in the hour of my agony and trial; that she, who, till the last evening we
had met, had ever been so docile, in the sweetness of a nature femininely
subinissive to my slightest wish, should have disregarded my solemn
injunction, and admitted Margrave to acquaintance, nay, to familiar
intimacy,--at the very time, too, when to disobey my injunctions was to
embitter my ordeal, and add her own contempt to the degradation imposed
upon my honour! No, her heart must be wholly gone from me; her very
nature wholly warped. A union between us had become impossible. My love
for her remained unshattered; the more tender, perhaps, for a sentiment of
compassion. But my pride was shocked, my heart was wounded. My love was
not mean and servile. Enough for me to think that she would be at least
saved from Margrave. Her life associated with his!--contemplation
horrible and ghastly!--from that fate she was saved. Later, she would
recover the effect of an influence happily so brief. She might form some
new attachment, some new tie; but love once withdrawn is never to be
restored--and her love was withdrawn from me. I had but to release her,
with my own lips, from our engagement,--she would welcome that release.