nk that she shone over these
harvests and the reapers.

CHAPTER XXX. A SUMMER STORM, AND LOVE

The foregoing conversations with Ottilia and her teacher, hard as they
were for passion to digest, grew luminous on a relapsing heart. Without
apprehending either their exact purport or the characters of the
speakers, I was transformed by them from a state of craving to one of
intense quietude. I thought neither of winning her, nor of aiming to win
her, but of a foothold on the heights she gazed at reverently. And if,
sometimes, seeing and hearing her, I thought, Oh, rarest soul! the wish
was, that brother and sisterhood of spirit might be ours. My other eager
thirstful self I shook off like a thing worn out. Men in my confidence
would have supposed me more rational: I was simply possessed.

My desire was to go into harness, buried in books, and for recreation
to chase visions of original ideas for benefiting mankind. A clear-wined
friend at my elbow, my dear Temple, perhaps, could have hit on the track
of all this mental vagueness, but it is doubtful that he would have
pushed me out of the strange mood, half stupor, half the folding-in of
passion; it was such magical happiness. Not to be awake, yet vividly
sensible; to lie calm and reflect, and only to reflect; be satisfied
with each succeeding hour and the privations of the hour, and, as if in
the depths of a smooth water, to gather fold over patient fold of the
submerged self, safe from wounds; the happiness was not noble, but it
breathed and was harmless, and it gave me rest when the alternative was
folly and bitterness.

Visitors were coming to the palace to meet the prince, on his return
with my father from England. I went back to the University, jealous of
the invasion of my ecstatic calm by new faces, and jealous when there
of the privileges those new faces would enjoy; and then, how my recent
deadness of life cried out against me as worse than a spendthrift, a
destroyer! a nerveless absorbent of the bliss showered on me--the
light of her morning presence when, just before embracing, she made
her obeisance to the margravine, and kindly saluted me, and stooped her
forehead for the baroness to kiss it; her gestures and her voice; her
figure on horseback, with old Warhead following, and I meeting her but
once!--her walk with the Professor, listening to his instructions;
I used to see them walking up and down the cypress path of the villa
garden, her ear given to