nts
of passion, which transported me into unknown regions, where I seemed
to breathe for the first time the native air of my own thoughts. All
the levity, fickleness, and vanity, the aridity, irony, and bitterness,
of the evil days of my youth, disappeared, and I scarcely recognized
myself. When I left her presence I felt myself good, and thought myself
pure. Once more I felt enthusiasm, prayer, inward piety, and the warm
tears which flow not from the eyes, but well out like a secret spring
from beneath our apparent aridity, and cleanse the heart without
enervating it. I vowed never to descend from the celestial but by no
means giddy heights to which I had been raised by her tender
reproaches, her voice, her single presence. It was as a second
innocence of my soul, imparted by the rays of the eternal innocence of
her love.

I could not say whether there was most piety, or fascination in the
impression I received, so much did passion and adoration mingle in
equal portions, and in my thoughts change, a thousand times in one
minute, love into worship, or worship into love. Oh, is not that the
height, the very pinnacle of love,--enthusiasm in the possession of
perfect beauty, and rapture in supreme adoration?... All she had said
seemed to me eternal; all she had looked on appeared to me sacred. I
envied the earth on which she had trodden; the sunshine which had
enveloped her during our walks appeared to me happy to have touched
her. I would have wished to abstract and separate forever from the
liquid plains of air, the air that she had sanctified in breathing it;
I would have enclosed the empty place that she had just ceased to fill
in space, so that no inferior creature should occupy it, so long as the
world should last. In a word, I saw and felt, I worshipped God himself,
through the medium of my love. If life were to last in such a condition
of the soul, Nature would stand still, the blood would cease to
circulate, the heart forget to beat, or rather, there would be neither
motion, precipitation, nor lassitude, neither life, nor death, in our
senses; there would be only one endless and living absorption of our
being in another's, such as must be the state of the soul at once
annihilated and living in God.

XXX.

Oh, joy! the vile desires of sensual passion were annulled (as she had
wished) in the full possession of each other's soul, and happiness, as
happiness ever does, made me feel better and more pious th