once
more blended with her own?

What! and was this to be no more? Were those mystic and sweet revealings
to be mute to me forever? Were my thoughts of Isora to be henceforth
bounded to the charnel-house and the worm? Was she indeed _no more_? _No
more_, oh, intolerable despair! Why, there was not a thing I had once
known, not a dog that I had caressed, not a book that I had read,
which I could know that I should see _no more_, and, knowing, not
feel something of regret. No more! were we, indeed, parted forever and
forever? Had she gone in her young years, with her warm affections, her
new hopes, all green and unwithered at her heart, at once into dust,
stillness, ice? And had I known her only for one year, one little year,
to see her torn from me by a violent and bloody death, and to be left a
mourner in this vast and eternal charnel, without a solitary consolation
or a gleam of hope? Was the earth to be henceforth a mere mass conjured
from the bones and fattened by the clay of our dead sires? Were the
stars and the moon to be mere atoms and specks of a chill light, no
longer worlds, which the ardent spirit might hereafter reach and be
fitted to enjoy? Was the heaven--the tender, blue, loving heaven, in
whose far regions I had dreamed was Isora's home, and had, therefore,
grown better and happier when I gazed upon it--to be nothing but cloud
and air? and had the love which had seemed so immortal, and so springing
from that which had not blent itself with mortality, been but a gross
lamp fed only by the properties of a brute nature, and placed in a dark
cell of clay, to glimmer, to burn, and to expire with the frail walls
which it had illumined? Dust, death, worms,--were these the heritage of
love and hope, of thought, of passion, of all that breathed and kindled
and exalted and _created_ within?

Could I contemplate this idea; could I believe it possible? _I could
not_. But against the abstract, the logical arguments for this idea,
had I a reply? I shudder as I write that at that time I had not! I
endeavoured to fix my whole thoughts to the study of those subtle
reasonings which I had hitherto so imperfectly conned: but my mind was
jarring, irresolute, bewildered, confused; my stake seemed too vast to
allow me coolness for the game.

Whoever has had cause for some refined and deep study in the midst of
the noisy and loud world may perhaps readily comprehend that feeling
which now possessed me; a feeling that it was