ver in the masses of intrigue, in the festivals of pleasure,
in the tumults of ambition, in the blaze of a licentious court, or
by the rude tents of a barbarous host,--never, my buried love, had I
forgotten thee! That remembrance, had no other cause existed, would
have led me to God. Every night, in whatever toils or whatever objects,
whatever failures or triumphs, the day had been consumed; every night
before I laid my head upon my widowed and lonely pillow,--I had knelt
down and lifted my heart to Heaven, blending the hopes of that Heaven
with the memory and the vision of Isora. Prayer had seemed to me a
commune not only with the living God, but with the dead by whom His
dwelling is surrounded. Pleasant and soft was it to turn to one thought,
to which all the holiest portions of my nature clung between the
wearying acts of this hard and harsh drama of existence. Even the
bitterness of Isora's early and unavenged death passed away when I
thought of the heaven to which she was gone, and in which, though I
journeyed now through sin and travail and recked little if the paths of
others differed from my own, I yet trusted with a solemn trust that
I should meet her at last. There was I to merit her with a love as
undying, and at length as pure, as her own. It was this that at the
stated hour in which, after my prayer for our reunion, I surrendered my
spirit to the bright and wild visions of her far, but _not impassable_
home,--it was this which for that single hour made all around me a
paradise of delighted thoughts! It was not the little earth, nor the
cold sky, nor the changing wave, nor the perishable turf,--no, nor the
dead wall and the narrow chamber,--which were around me then! No dreamer
ever was so far from the localities of flesh and life as I was in that
enchanted hour: a light seemed to settle upon all things around me; her
voice murmured on my ear, her kisses melted on my brow; I shut my eyes,
and I fancied that I beheld her.

Wherefore was this comfort? Whence came the spell which admitted me to
this fairy land? What was the source of the hope and the rapture and the
delusion? Was it not the deep certainty that _Isora yet existed_; that
her spirit, her nature, her love were preserved, were inviolate, were
the same? That they watched over me yet, that she knew that in that hour
I was with her, that she felt my prayer, that even then she anticipated
the moment when my soul should burst the human prison-house and be