rom hers, was a
whisper of tenderness and endearment! Still when I was absent from her,
my soul seemed to mourn a separation from its better and dearer part,
and the joyous senses of existence saddened and shrank into a single
want! Still was her presence to my heart as a breathing atmosphere of
poesy which circled and tinted all human things; still was my being
filled with that delicious and vague melancholy which the very excess of
rapture alone produces,--the knowledge we dare not breathe to ourselves
that the treasure in which our heart is stored is not above the
casualties of fate. The sigh that mingles with the kiss; the tear that
glistens in the impassioned and yearning gaze; the deep tide in our
spirit, over which the moon and the stars have power; the chain of
harmony within the thought which has a mysterious link with all that is
fair and pure and bright in Nature, knitting as it were loveliness with
love!--all this, all that I cannot express; all that to the young for
whom the real world has had few spells, and the world of visions has
been a home, who love at last and for the first time,--all that to them
are known were still mine.

In truth, Isora was one well calculated to sustain and to rivet romance.
The cast of her beauty was so dreamlike, and yet so varying: her temper
was so little mingled with the common characteristics of woman; it had
so little of caprice, so little of vanity, so utter an absence of all
jealous and all angry feeling; it was so made up of tenderness and
devotion, and yet so imaginative and fairy-like in its fondness,--that
it was difficult to bear only the sentiments of earth for one who had
so little of earth's clay. She was more like the women whom one imagines
are the creations of poetry, and yet of whom no poetry, save that of
Shakspeare, reminds us; and to this day, when I go into the world, I
never see aught of our own kind which recalls her, or even one of her
features, to my memory. But when I am alone with Nature, methinks a
sweet sound or a new-born flower has something of familiar power over
those stored and deep impressions which do make her image, and it brings
her more vividly before my eyes than any shape or face of her own sex,
however beautiful it may be.

There was also another trait in her character which, though arising in
her weakness, not her virtues, yet perpetuated the more dreamlike and
imaginary qualities of our passion: this was a melancholy superstition,