nd
loved you less."

"Despise you!" I murmured, and I threw my arms around her, and drew her
to my breast. I felt her heart beat against my own: those hearts spoke,
though our lips were silent, and in their language seemed to say, "We
are united now, and we will not part."

The starlight, shining with a mellow and deep stillness, was the only
light by which we beheld each other: it shone, the witness and the
sanction of that internal voice, which we owned, but heard not. Our lips
drew closer and closer together, till they met! and in that kiss was the
type and promise of the after ritual which knit two spirits into one.
Silence fell around us like a curtain, and the eternal Night, with her
fresh dews and unclouded stars, looked alone upon the compact of our
hearts,--an emblem of the eternity, the freshness, and the unearthly
though awful brightness of the love which it hallowed and beheld!

BOOK III.

CHAPTER I.

WHEREIN THE HISTORY MAKES GREAT PROGRESS AND IS MARKED BY ONE IMPORTANT
EVENT IN HUMAN LIFE.

SPINOZA is said to have loved, above all other amusements, to put flies
into a spider's web; and the struggles of the imprisoned insects were
wont to bear, in the eyes of this grave philosopher, so facetious and
hilarious an appearance, that he would stand and laugh thereat until the
tears "coursed one another down his innocent nose." Now it so happened
that Spinoza, despite the general (and, in my most meek opinion, the
just) condemnation of his theoretical tenets,* was, in character and
in nature, according to the voices of all who knew him, an exceedingly
kind, humane, and benevolent biped; and it doth, therefore, seem a
little strange unto us grave, sober members of the unphilosophical Many,
that the struggles and terrors of these little winged creatures should
strike the good subtleist in a point of view so irresistibly ludicrous
and delightful. But, for my part, I believe that that most imaginative
and wild speculator beheld in the entangled flies nothing more than a
living simile--an animated illustration--of his own beloved vision
of Necessity; and that he is no more to be considered cruel for the
complacency with which he gazed upon those agonized types of his
system than is Lucan for dwelling with a poet's pleasure upon the many
ingenious ways with which that Grand Inquisitor of Verse has contrived
to vary the simple operation of dying. To the bard, the butchered
soldier was only an epic orn