rightened at once
into himself in his happiest mood. He poured forth a torrent of grateful
confidence, of buoyant love, that soon swept from the remembrance of
the blushing and enchanted Madeline, the momentary fear, the sudden
chillness, which his look had involuntarily stricken into her mind. And
as they now wound along the most lonely part of that wild valley, his
arm twined round her waist, and his low but silver voice pouring magic
into the very air she breathed--she felt perhaps a more entire and
unruffled sentiment of present, and a more credulous persuasion of
future, happiness, than she had ever experienced before. And Aram
himself dwelt with a more lively and detailed fulness, than he was wont,
on the prospects they were to share, and the security and peace which
retirement would instill into their mode of life.

"Is it not," said he, with a lofty triumph that we shall look from our
retreat upon the shifting passions, and the hollow loves of the distant
world? We can have no petty object, no vain allurement to distract the
unity of our affection: we must be all in all to each other; for what
else can there be to engross our thoughts, and occupy our feelings here?

"If, my beautiful love, you have selected one whom the world might
deem a strange choice for youth and loveliness like yours; you have, at
least, selected one who can have no idol but yourself. The poets tell
you, and rightly, that solitude is the fit sphere for love; but how
few are the lovers whom solitude does not fatigue! they rush into
retirement, with souls unprepared for its stern joys and its unvarying
tranquillity: they weary of each other, because the solitude itself to
which they fled, palls upon and oppresses them. But to me, the freedom
which low minds call obscurity, is the aliment of life; I do not enter
the temples of Nature as the stranger, but the priest: nothing can ever
tire me of the lone and august altars, on which I sacrificed my youth:
and now, what Nature, what Wisdom once were to me--no, no, more,
immeasurably more than these, you are! Oh, Madeline! methinks there is
nothing under Heaven like the feeling which puts us apart from all that
agitates, and fevers, and degrades the herd of men; which grants us
to control the tenour of our future life, because it annihilates our
dependence upon others, and, while the rest of earth are hurried on,
blind and unconscious, by the hand of Fate, leaves us the sole lords of
our destiny;