ought could never be revived. The ashes gave forth a lingering
flame at the first murmurings of that voice. Who has ever felt himself
return to youth and purity after growing cold and numb with age and
soiled with impurity? Suddenly, Wilfrid loved as he had never loved; he
loved secretly, with faith, with fear, with inward madness. His life was
stirred to the very source of his being at the mere thought of seeing
Seraphita. As he listened to her he was transported into unknown worlds;
he was mute before her, she magnetized him. There, beneath the snows,
among the glaciers, bloomed the celestial flower to which his hopes, so
long betrayed, aspired; the sight of which awakened ideas of freshness,
purity, and faith which grouped about his soul and lifted it to higher
regions,--as Angels bear to heaven the Elect in those symbolic pictures
inspired by the guardian spirit of a great master. Celestial perfumes
softened the granite hardness of the rocky scene; light endowed with
speech shed its divine melodies on the path of him who looked to heaven.
After emptying the cup of terrestrial love which his teeth had bitten as
he drank it, he saw before him the chalice of salvation where the limpid
waters sparkled, making thirsty for ineffable delights whoever dare
apply his lips burning with a faith so strong that the crystal shall not
be shattered.

But Wilfrid now encountered the wall of brass for which he had been
seeking up and down the earth. He went impetuously to Seraphita, meaning
to express the whole force and bearing of a passion under which he
bounded like the fabled horse beneath the iron horseman, firm in his
saddle, whom nothing moves while the efforts of the fiery animal only
made the rider heavier and more solid. He sought her to relate his
life,--to prove the grandeur of his soul by the grandeur of his faults,
to show the ruins of his desert. But no sooner had he crossed
her threshold, and found himself within the zone of those eyes of
scintillating azure, that met no limits forward and left none behind,
than he grew calm and submissive, as a lion, springing on his prey in
the plains of Africa, receives from the wings of the wind a message
of love, and stops his bound. A gulf opened before him, into which his
frenzied words fell and disappeared, and from which uprose a voice which
changed his being; he became as a child, a child of sixteen, timid and
frightened before this maiden with serene brow, this white figure