little or no attention to the cultivation of the intellect of his
daughter, whom he had merely instructed in the elementary branches of
education; in all which, however, she evinced an aptitude and
perfectability that indicated quickness of genius and a capability of
far higher attainments. Books he principally withheld from her, because
they brought the image of man, whom he hated, and wished she should
also hate, too often in flattering colours before her; and had any work
treating of love been found to have crept accidentally into his own
collection, it would instantly and indignantly have been committed to
the flames.

"Thus left to the action of her own heart--the guidance of her own
feelings--it was but natural your mother should have suffered her
imagination to repose on an ideal happiness, which, although in some
degree destitute of shape and character, was still powerfully felt.
Nature is too imperious a law-giver to be thwarted in her dictates; and
however we may seek to stifle it, her inextinguishable voice will make
itself heard, whether it be in the lonely desert or in the crowded
capital. Possessed of a glowing heart and warm sensibilities, Clara
Beverley felt the energies of her being had not been given to her to be
wasted on herself. In her dreams by night, and her thoughts by day, she
had pictured a being endowed with those attributes which were the fruit
of her own fertility of conception. If she plucked a flower, (and all
this she admitted at our first interview," groaned Wacousta,) "she was
sensible of the absence of one to whom that flower might be given. If
she gazed at the star-studded canopy of heaven, or bent her head over
the frowning precipices by which she was every where surrounded, she
felt the absence of him with whom she could share the enthusiasm
excited by the contemplation of the one, and to whom she could impart
the mingled terror and admiration produced by the dizzying depths of
the other. What dear acknowledgments (alas! too deceitful,) flowed from
her guileless lips, even during that first interview. With a candour
and unreservedness that spring alone from unsophisticated manners and
an untainted heart, she admitted, that the instant she beheld me, she
felt she had found the being her fancy had been so long tutored to
linger on, and her heart to love. She was sure I was come to be her
husband (for she had understood from her aged attendant that a man who
loved a woman wished to be