ngest my senses have witnessed or
feigned in the fraud they have palmed on me--is greater than that
by which a simple affection, that all men profess to have known, has
changed the courses of life prearranged by my hopes and confirmed by my
judgment? How calmly before I knew love I have anatomized its mechanism,
as the tyro who dissects the web-work of tissues and nerves in the dead!
Lo! it lives, lives in me; and, in living, escapes from my scalpel, and
mocks all my knowledge. Can love be reduced to the realm of the senses?
No; what nun is more barred by her grate from the realm of the senses
than my bride by her solemn affliction? Is love, then, the union of
kindred, harmonious minds? No, my beloved one sits by my side, and I
guess not her thoughts, and my mind is to her a sealed fountain. Yet I
love her more--oh, ineffably more!--for the doom which destroys the two
causes philosophy assigns to love--in the form, in the mind! How can I
now, in my vain physiology, say what is love, what is not? Is it love
which must tell me that man has a soul, and that in soul will be found
the solution of problems never to be solved in body or mind alone?"

My self-questionings halted here as Lilian's hand touched my shoulder.
She had risen from her seat, and had come to me.

"Are not the stars very far from earth?" she said.

"Very far."

"Are they seen for the first time to-night?"

"They were seen, I presume, as we see them, by the fathers of all human
races!"

"Yet close below us they shine reflected in the waters; and yet, see,
wave flows on wave before we can count it!"

"Lilian, by what sympathy do you read and answer my thought?"

Her reply was incoherent and meaningless. If a gleam of intelligence had
mysteriously lighted my heart to her view, it was gone. But drawing her
nearer towards me, my eye long followed wistfully the path of light,
dividing the darkness on either hand, till it closed in the sloping
horizon.

CHAPTER LXX.

The voyage is over. At the seaport at which we landed I found a letter
from Faber. My instructions had reached him in time to effect the
purchase on which his descriptions had fixed my desire. The stock, the
implements of husbandry, the furniture of the house, were included in
the purchase. All was prepared for my arrival, and I hastened from
the then miserable village, which may some day rise into one of the
mightiest capitals of the world, to my lodge in the wilderness.

It was