Ha! you start:
you believe me now.--Loved her!" he continued, after
another short pause--"oh, what a feeble word is love to
express the concentration of mighty feelings that flowed
like burning lava through my veins! Who shall pretend to
give a name to the emotion that ran thrillingly--madly
through my excited frame, when first I gazed on her, who,
in every attribute of womanly beauty, realised all my
fondest fancy ever painted?--Listen to me, Clara," he
pursued, in a fiercer tone, and with a convulsive pressure
of the form he still encircled:--"If, in my younger days,
my mind was alive to enterprise, and loved to contemplate
danger in its most appalling forms, this was far from
being the master passion of my soul; nay, it was the
strong necessity I felt of pouring into some devoted
bosom the overflowing fulness of my heart, that made me
court in solitude those positions of danger with which
the image of woman was ever associated. 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.
Pages:
675
676
677
678
679
680
681
682
683
684
685
686
687
688
689
690
691
692
693
694
695
696
697
698
699