ruinous house shook, and its timbers groaned, and the
blackness of the sky, as the storm increased, deepened the lurid hue of
the foul and turbulent fog, (for such the mountain cloud thus in contact
with her eyes appeared.) The world, as it were, already left behind, or
rather below, the elements alone warring round her, her high-wrought
imagination began to regard life and death, and the world itself, as
things no longer appertaining to her, except as a passive instrument
toward one great object, the preservation of her father's freedom, and,
if it _were_ possible, also of her own inviolate person--that person
which she had, indeed, most solemnly vowed to one alone, David the
Telynwr. Not _to_ him--for her innate delicacy rendered such vows
repugnant to her; but alone, by the moon or stars, by the cataract, and
in the lonely lanes and woods, she had vowed herself to one alone--had
dedicated her virgin beauty (in the spirit of those romances she had
fatally devoured) to her "night-harper" with as true devotion as ever
did white vestal, at the end of her noviciate, devote herself alive and
dead to the one God. Instilled by the touching tone, the wild pathos,
the swimming eye of a wayward passionate character, weak, yet bold, of
whom she knew almost nothing, this devoted girl yielded up her better
reason to his rash innovations in morals, his examples of suicidal
heroes, and even _moralists_, among the ancients; and in the wild
height, alone, among the clouds, she almost wrought up her fond
agonizing soul to a terrible part--the accomplishing her father's
preservation, _on her wedding-day_, through the influence she might
naturally expect to obtain in such a season, and that done, make her
peace with God; and, before night--black pools--rock precipices, fearful
as Leucadia's--mortal plants, and even the horrid knife and
halter--floated before her mind's eye without her trembling, even like
terrible, yet kind, ministrants proffering escape--escape from legalised
violation!--escape from _perjury_, to her, the self-doomed Iphigenia!
For her morbid fancy, whispered to by her intense tenderness, conjured
up that dilemma between faith broken to her lover and abandonment of a
dear parent to his fate. Despair suggested that self-destruction itself
might seem venial, even before God, when rushed upon as the only
alternative to perjury--to prostitution; for such her romantic purity
taught her to consider submission to the embrace of