"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.
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