There was a desperate exultation in that moment, too!--a riotous sense of fierce happiness! I was carrying away Astræa from the whole world! Astræa was giving up the whole world for me! My heart beat loudly, and poured its palpitating blood into my throbbing temples. The postillion cracked his whip, and the panting horses started off with a plunge, as if they would tear up the earth. We turned to each other--our faces were lighted up with a flash of rapture--I clasped her hands in mine, and showered a hundred burning kisses upon them; and when we cleared the little valley, and felt the fresh breeze of the cool uplands upon our cheeks, we thought that, from the days of the first innocence in the garden of Eden to that hour, no two people ever loved each other so passionately, or were ever so profoundly happy! II. The first hour of accomplished love is, perhaps, the only passage in a man's life with which he is perfectly satisfied. It is the only reality that does not disappoint the dream of expectation. There is no region of speculation beyond it--its horizon bounds his world--its present engulfs his past and his future. In all other circumstances, it is true that-- Man never is, but always to be, blest; but here the aphorism is falsified. In this brief hour, the lover is so thoroughly "blest" as to have but one desire left--that it should last forever! Clouds, surcharged with tears that will not flow, gather into our eyes as we look back upon these memories. What we both wanted was oblivion. We were anxious to forget every thing, except the perilous delight we had borne, like a burning brand, out of that dark struggle. We had the oblivion we desired--for a time. All other considerations were absorbed in ourselves. The scenes and the people with whom we had been mixed up, and the incidents that had driven us out from among them, entered no more into our conversation than if they had never existed. We felt that we had given up the old life, and had begun a new one, and that an effort was necessary to strengthen ourselves against any suggestions of pity or remorse that might point toward the waste and ashes we had left behind us. We felt, too, that those efforts hardened us; but people who harden themselves for each other's sake against the rest of the world, have a great faith in their own sensibility while the process of hardening is going on. They even believe that the more callous they become, and the more completely they isolate their sympathies, the more tenderness they are capable of developing to each other. It is like people who bar up their doors and windows to enjoy themselves by themselves, forgetting that all genial and healthy elements and influences--light, sunshine, air--are diffusive and universal.