this loneliness that they might
be silent together, that they might sit, hour after hour, and just watch
each other, lost in an ecstasy of contemplation, a trance of
recognition, a fascination that was almost fearful, that was so kind and
yet so cruel in its very power?

The woods are very still, but there is nothing in the world so still as
these two lovers, as they lie down on the green earth and gaze on each
other, hour after hour. When they find a word as great as their
silence, they will speak it--but they will find none except it be
"Isabel," except it be "Theophil."

And great passion has as little use for caresses as for words, and
kisses, which gay sensual love gathers greedily like little golden
flowers, and pays for nimbly with little, pretty words, will be almost
as rare as words.

Kisses! it is not to eat bonbons that these two have come out into the
woods.

Kisses! what kiss of the blind lips could match the kiss of those rapt
tragic eyes!

Kisses are but the diminutives of the great word "love;" they are but
the small change of passion, meteorites, star-dust of the great and
terrible planet.

Their souls are swung high above time and space in one never-ending
kiss,--the kiss of that predestined irrefragable union, of which
meetings and partings and kisses and caresses and words, and every other
fragmentary mode of expression, are but trivial accidents, to which
distance is still nearness, and nearness is still distance.

Their love is a property of eternal elements. It is fated as the union
of magnetic powers, it obeys chemic laws of irresistible combination.
They are Isabel and Theophil,--that is their love; they are in the world
together,--that is their marriage.

But passion will not be all day a tragedian. He has many moods. He is a
great wit,--how bright, how bright, he makes the brain!--a merry
comrade, a little, tender, silly child; and these two sad ones laughed
together, too, in the still woods,--for was not the most exquisite
humourist in the world their companion, love, who is all things by
turns, and all things wise?

And they feasted together, wine and great grapes, spread out on the
earth's green table; and they called each other silly, beautiful names,
and they feigned sad little glad stories--and called the wood their
home: this was their breakfast-oak, and that glade should be their great
hall, and high, high up in yonder beech, where the squirrel was sitting,
should be their