. How often, while tossed by the raging
elements, now into the blue vault of heaven, now into the lowest gulfs
of the sea, have I madly wished to press to my bounding bosom the being
of my fancy's creation, who, all enamoured and given to her love,
should, even amid the danger that environed her, be alive but to one
consciousness,--that of being with him on whom her life's hope alone
reposed! How often, too, while bending over some dark and threatening
precipice, or standing on the utmost verge of some tall projecting
cliff, my aching head (aching with the intenseness of its own
conceptions) bared to the angry storm, and my eye fixed unshrinkingly
on the boiling ocean far beneath my feet, has my whole soul--my every
faculty, been bent on that ideal beauty which controlled every sense!
Oh, imagination, how tyrannical is thy sway--how exclusive thy
power--how insatiable thy thirst! Surrounded by living beauty, I was
insensible to its influence; for, with all the perfection that reality
can attain on earth, there was ever to be found some deficiency, either
physical or moral, that defaced the symmetry and destroyed the
loveliness of the whole; but, no sooner didst thou, with magic wand,
conjure up one of thy embodiments, than my heart became a sea of flame,
and was consumed in the vastness of its own fires.

"It was in vain that my family sought to awaken me to a sense of the
acknowledged loveliness of the daughters of more than one ancient house
in the county, with one of whom an alliance was, in many respects,
considered desirable. Their beauty, or rather their whole, was
insufficient to stir up into madness the dormant passions of my nature;
and although my breast was like a glowing furnace, in which fancy cast
all the more exciting images of her coinage to secure the last impress
of the heart's approval, my outward deportment to some of the fairest
and loveliest of earth's realities was that of one on whom the
influence of woman's beauty could have no power. From my earliest
boyhood I had loved to give the rein to these feelings, until they at
length rendered me their slave. Woman was the idol that lay enshrined
within my inmost heart; but it was woman such as I had not yet met
with, yet felt must somewhere exist in the creation. For her I could
have resigned title, fortune, family, every thing that is dear to man,
save the life, through which alone the reward of such sacrifice could
have been tasted, and to this phant