nor make them comrades, nor yield them affection. But Ginevra had a
kind of spirit with her, empowered to give constant strength and
comfort, to gladden daylight and embalm darkness; the best of the good
genii that guard humanity curtained her with his wings, and canopied
her head with his bending form. By True Love was Ginevra followed:
never could she be alone. Was she insensible to this presence? It
seemed to me impossible: I could not realize such deadness. I imagined
her grateful in secret, loving now with reserve; but purposing one day
to show how much she loved: I pictured her faithful hero half conscious
of her coy fondness, and comforted by that consciousness: I conceived
an electric chord of sympathy between them, a fine chain of mutual
understanding, sustaining union through a separation of a hundred
leagues--carrying, across mound and hollow, communication by prayer and
wish. Ginevra gradually became with me a sort of heroine. One day,
perceiving this growing illusion, I said, "I really believe my nerves
are getting overstretched: my mind has suffered somewhat too much a
malady is growing upon it--what shall I do? How shall I keep well?"

Indeed there was no way to keep well under the circumstances. At last a
day and night of peculiarly agonizing depression were succeeded by
physical illness, I took perforce to my bed. About this time the Indian
summer closed and the equinoctial storms began; and for nine dark and
wet days, of which the hours rushed on all turbulent, deaf,
dishevelled--bewildered with sounding hurricane--I lay in a strange
fever of the nerves and blood. Sleep went quite away. I used to rise in
the night, look round for her, beseech her earnestly to return. A
rattle of the window, a cry of the blast only replied---Sleep never
came!

I err. She came once, but in anger. Impatient of my importunity she
brought with her an avenging dream. By the clock of St. Jean Baptiste,
that dream remained scarce fifteen minutes--a brief space, but
sufficing to wring my whole frame with unknown anguish; to confer a
nameless experience that had the hue, the mien, the terror, the very
tone of a visitation from eternity. Between twelve and one that night a
cup was forced to my lips, black, strong, strange, drawn from no well,
but filled up seething from a bottomless and boundless sea. Suffering,
brewed in temporal or calculable measure, and mixed for mortal lips,
tastes not as this suffering tasted. Having drank