Was St. John right? I believe that in most instances he was; and perhaps the custom was not continued in my case long enough for me to refute the maxim. But as yet, the very gloss upon the god’s wings was fresh as on the first day when I had acknowledged his power. Still was Isora to me the light and the music of existence! still did my heart thrill and leap within me when her silver and fond voice made the air a blessing! Still would I hang over her, when her beautiful features lay hushed in sleep, and watch the varying hues of her cheek; and fancy, while she slept, that in each low, sweet breath that my lips drew from hers, was a whisper of tenderness and endearment! Still when I was absent from her, my soul seemed to mourn a separation from its better and dearer part, and the joyous senses of existence saddened and shrank into a single want! Still was her presence to my heart as a breathing atmosphere of poesy which circled and tinted all human things; still was my being filled with that delicious and vague melancholy which the very excess of rapture alone produces,--the knowledge we dare not breathe to ourselves that the treasure in which our heart is stored is not above the casualties of fate. The sigh that mingles with the kiss; the tear that glistens in the impassioned and yearning gaze; the deep tide in our spirit, over which the moon and the stars have power; the chain of harmony within the thought which has a mysterious link with all that is fair and pure and bright in Nature, knitting as it were loveliness with love!--all this, all that I cannot express; all that to the young for whom the real world has had few spells, and the world of visions has been a home, who love at last and for the first time,--all that to them are known were still mine. In truth, Isora was one well calculated to sustain and to rivet romance. The cast of her beauty was so dreamlike, and yet so varying: her temper was so little mingled with the common characteristics of woman; it had so little of caprice, so little of vanity, so utter an absence of all jealous and all angry feeling; it was so made up of tenderness and devotion, and yet so imaginative and fairy-like in its fondness,--that it was difficult to bear only the sentiments of earth for one who had so little of earth’s clay. She was more like the women whom one imagines are the creations of poetry, and yet of whom no poetry, save that of Shakspeare, reminds us; and to this day, when I go into the world, I never see aught of our own kind which recalls her, or even one of her features, to my memory. But when I am alone with Nature, methinks a sweet sound or a new-born flower has something of familiar power over those stored and deep impressions which do make her image, and it brings her more vividly before my eyes than any shape or face of her own sex, however beautiful it may be.