blessings be
hers!" Thus did soft melodies flow through his heart; tones of an
infinite gratitude; sweetest intimations that he also was a man, that
for him also unutterable joys had been provided.

'In free speech, earnest or gay, amid lambent glances, laughter,
tears, and often with the inarticulate mystic speech of Music: such
was the element they now lived in; in such a many-tinted, radiant
Aurora, and by this fairest of Orient Light-bringers must our Friend
be blandished, and the new Apocalypse of Nature unrolled to him.
Fairest Blumine! And, even as a Star, all Fire and humid Softness, a
very Light-ray incarnate! Was there so much as a fault, a "caprice,"
he could have dispensed with? Was she not to him in very deed a
Morning-Star; did not her presence bring with it airs from Heaven? As
from AEolian Harps in the breath of dawn, as from the Memnon's Statue
struck by the rosy finger of Aurora, unearthly music was around him,
and lapped him into untried balmy Rest. Pale Doubt fled away to the
distance; Life bloomed-up with happiness and hope. The past, then, was
all a haggard dream; he had been in the Garden of Eden, then, and
could not discern it! But lo now! the black walls of his prison melt
away; the captive is alive, is free. If he loved his Disenchantress?
_Ach Gott!_ His whole heart and soul and life were hers, but never had
he named it Love: existence was all a Feeling, not yet shaped into a
Thought.'

Nevertheless, into a Thought, nay into an Action, it must be shaped;
for neither Disenchanter nor Disenchantress, mere 'Children of Time,'
can abide by Feeling alone. The Professor knows not, to this day, 'how
in her soft, fervid bosom the Lovely found determination, even on hest
of Necessity, to cut-asunder these so blissful bonds.' He even appears
surprised at the 'Duenna Cousin,' whoever she may have been, 'in whose
meagre, hunger-bitten philosophy, the religion of young hearts was,
from the first, faintly approved of.' We, even at such distance, can
explain it without necromancy. Let the Philosopher answer this one
question: What figure, at that period, was a Mrs. Teufelsdroeckh likely
to make in polished society? Could she have driven so much as a
brass-bound Gig, or even a simple iron-spring one? Thou foolish
'absolved Auscultator,' before whom lies no prospect of capital, will
any yet known 'religion of young hearts' keep the human kitchen warm?
Pshaw! thy divine Blumine when she 'resigned herself to w