goodness and warm-heartedness. Knowing that every female in his circle
was well informed of his ample fortune, still accumulating, he fancied
art, deceit, coquetry in every smile and glance, (for suspicion of human
hearts and motives ever besets the melancholic character;) and thus, it
was natural that he should sometimes sigh over the idea of some fresh
mountain beauty, not trained by parents in the art and to the task of
husband-hunting. Even the soft-faced child, just growing into woman, who
had held her pinafore for fruit, in the orchard, whose half-fallen
apple-tree was his almost constant seat, floated across his vacant, yet
restless mind. In truth, when she surprised him in his part of sexton to
his owl, she had evinced rather more sympathy than she had admitted to
his other self, David the wood-wanderer; and though she had indeed
laughed, it was with tears in her eyes, elicited by one she detected in
the shy averted orbs of his. Yet was the sweetness of the little Welsh
girl left behind, for a long time, even when manhood failed to banish
its idea, no more than his statue to Pygmalion, or his watery image to
Narcissus. But having no female society, save those marketable forms
that he distrusted and despised; yet pining, in his romantic refinement,
for _pure_ passion--for reciprocal passion--panting to be loved _for
himself alone_, he kept imagining her developed graces, exaggerating the
conceit of some childish tenderness toward himself, his position and his
nervous infirmity keeping a solitude of soul and heart ever round him,
into which no female form had free and constant admission, but that
aerial one, the little Winifred, of far, far off, green Wales! The
promise of pure beauty, which her childhood gave, his _dream_ fulfilled;
and his imagination seized and cherished the beautiful cloud, painted by
fancy, till it became the goddess of his idolatry, though conscious of
the self-delusion, and retained with that tenacity conceivable, perhaps,
to the morbidly sensitive alone. The habit of yielding to the
importunity of one idea, strengthens itself; every recurrence of it
produces quicker sensibility to the next; deeper and deeper impression
follows, till one form of mania supervenes--that which consists in the
undue mastery and eternal presence of one idea.

Childish and _fugitive_ as it _seemed_, a passion had actually commenced
in his _boy's_ heart, which clung to that of the man, though under the
same light,