rodigious keen edge, with which love, presiding
over this act, points the pleasure: love! that may be styled the Attic
salt of enjoyment; and indeed, without it, the joy, great as it is,
is still a vulgar one, whether in a king or a beggar; for it is,
undoubtedly, love alone that refines, ennobles, and exalts it.

Thus, happy, then, by the heart, happy by the senses, it was beyond all
power, even of thought, to form the conception of a greater delight than
what I now am consummating the fruition of.

Charles, whose whole frame was convulsed with the agitation of his
rapture, whilst the tenderest fires trembled in his eyes, all assured me
of a perfect concord of joy, penetrated me so profoundly, touched me
so vitally, took me so much out of my own possession, whilst he seemed
himself so much in mine, that in a delicious enthusiasm, I imagined such
a transfusion of heart and spirit, as that coalescing, and making one
body and soul with him, I was he, and he me.

But all this pleasure tending, like life from its first instants,
towards its own dissolution, lived too fast not to bring on upon the
spur its delicious moment of mortality; for presently the approach
of the tender agony discovered itself by its usual signals, that were
quickly followed by my dear lover's emanation of himself, that spun out,
and shot, feelingly indeed! up the ravished indraught: where the sweetly
soothing balmy titillation opened all the juices of joy on my side,
which extatic-ally in flow helped to allay the prurient glow, and
drowned our pleasure for a while. Soon, however, to be on float
again! for Charles, true to nature's laws, in one breath, expiring
and ejaculating, languished not long in the dissolving trance, but
recovering spirit again, soon gave me to feel that the true mettle
spring! of his instrument of pleasure, were, by love, and perhaps, by a
long vacation, wound up too high to be let down by a single explosion:
his stiffnesss till stood my friend. Resuming then the action afresh,
without dislodging, or giving me the trouble of parting from my sweet
tenant, we played over again the same opera, with the same harmony and
concert: our ardours, like our love, knew no remission; and all the
tide serving my lover, lavish of his stores, and pleasure-milked, he
over-flowed me once more from the fulness of his oval reservoirs of the
genial emulsion: whilst, on my side, a convulsive grasp, in the
instant of my giving down the liquid contr