ike a man with a yawning wound,
and had to whip the sense of passion for a drug. Toward which one it
strove I know not; it was blind and stormy as the night.

Not a boatman would take me across. The lights of the island lay like a
crown on the water. I paced the ramparts, eyeing them, breathing the keen
salt of thundering waves, until they were robbed of their magic by the
coloured Fast.

It is, I have learnt, out of the conflict of sensations such as I then
underwent that a young man's brain and morality, supposing him not to
lean overmuch to sickly sentiment, becomes gradually enriched and
strengthened, and himself shaped for capable manhood. I was partly
conscious of a better condition in the morning; and a sober morning it
was to me after my long sentinel's step to and fro. I found myself
possessed of one key--whether the right one or not--wherewith to read the
princess, which was never possible to me when I was under stress of
passion, or of hope or despair; my perplexities over what she said, how
she looked, ceased to trouble me. I read her by this strange light: that
she was a woman who could only love intelligently--love, that is, in the
sense of giving herself. She had the power of passion, and it could be
stirred; but he who kindled it wrecked his chance if he could not stand
clear in her intellect's unsparing gaze. Twice already she must have felt
herself disillusioned by me. This third time, possibly, she blamed her
own fatally credulous tenderness, not me; but it was her third awakening,
and could affection and warmth of heart combat it? Her child's enthusiasm
for my country had prepared her for the impression which the waxen mind
of the dreamy invalid received deeply; and so, aided by the emotional
blood of youth, she gave me place in her imagination, probing me still
curiously, as I remembered, at a season when her sedate mind was
attaining to joint deliberations with the impulsive overgenerous heart.

Then ensued for her the successive shocks of discernment. She knew the to
have some of the vices, many follies, all the intemperateness of men who
carve a way for themselves in the common roads, if barely they do that.
And resembling common men (men, in a judgement elective as hers, common,
however able), I was not assuredly to be separated by her from my
associations; from the thought of my father, for example. Her look at him
in the lake-palace library, and her manner in unfolding and folding his
recent