blushed, after a time
subsided, and gave place to a calm effusion of the lips, which poured
forth together, or alternately, the plenitude of their expressions. It
was a continuous and murmuring transfusion of one soul into
another,--an unreserved interchange of our two natures,--a complete
transmutation of one into another, by the reciprocal communication of
all that breathed, or lived, or burned within us. Never, perhaps, did
two beings as irreproachable in their looks, or in their very thoughts,
bare their hearts to one another more unreservedly, and reveal the
mysterious depths of their feelings. The innocent nudity of our souls
was chaste, though unveiled, as light that discovers all, yet sullies
nothing. We had nought to reveal but the spotless love which purified
as it consumed us.

Our love, by its very purity, was incessantly renewed, with the same
light of soul, the same unsullied transports of its first bloom. Each
day was like the first; every instant was as that ineffable moment when
we felt it dawn within us, and saw it reflected in the heart and looks
of another self. Our love would always preserve its flower and its
perfume, for the fruit could never be culled.

LXXVIII.

Of all the different means by which God has allowed soul to communicate
with soul, through the transparent barrier of the senses, there was not
one that our love did not employ to manifest itself,--from the look
which conveys most of ourselves, in an almost ethereal ray, to the
closed lids, which seem to enfold within us the image we have received,
that it may not evaporate; from languor to delirium, from the sigh to
the loud cry; from the long silence to those exhaustless words which
flow from the lips without pause and without end, which stop the
breath, weary the tongue, which we pronounce without hearing them, and
which have no other meaning than an impotent effort to say, again and
again, what can never be said enough....

Many a time did we talk thus for hours, in whispered tones, leaning on
the little table close to each other, without perceiving that our
conversation had lasted more than the space of a single aspiration;
quite surprised to find that the minutes had flown as swiftly as our
words, and that the clock struck the inexorable hour of parting.

Sometimes there would be interrogations and answers as to our most
fugitive shades of thought and nature, dialogues in almost unheard
whispers, articulate sighs rat