These were brave words, and bravely uttered. Toward the close, Astræa had regained much of her original power; the strength of purpose and towering will, which I remembered so well in former days, and which gave so elevated a character to her beauty, came back once more, and lighted up her fine features. It was late; but what were hours to us? Day or night made little difference. We had no objects to call us up early--we had no occupations for the next day--it was immaterial whether we retired or sat up; and so in this listless mode of life we always followed the immediate impulse, whatever it might be. When we found ourselves weary, we betook ourselves to repose; when we felt inclined to talk and maunder over the fire, we never troubled ourselves to ask what o'clock it was. In short, time had no place in our calendar, which was governed, not by the revolutions of the earth, but by our own moods and sensations. We discussed a great question that night. No theme before a debating club--such as the choice between Peace and War, between Society or Solitude, or any of those grand abstract antitheses that agitate nations--was ever more completely exhausted in all its details than the question--Whether we should leave England, or remain at home, and go boldly into public, with the determination to live down the persecutions of the dwarf. It was a question of life or death with us. We both felt that any fate would be more welcome than the life to which we were then condemned. We pined for human faces and human voices. We were sick at heart of eternal loneliness. We longed for free intercourse with educated people like ourselves, who would sympathize with our intellectual wants, and talk to us in our own language. We had arrived at the discovery that the solitude we had colored so brightly in those happy hours of romance which love takes such pains in filling up with delusions, would be rendered much more agreeable by an occasional variety, or an incidental shock from without--any thing that would stir the pulses and awaken the life-blood that was growing stagnant in our veins. We were not weary of each other; on the contrary, anxiety had brought our hearts more closely together; but we had drunk all the light out each other's eyes, and our aspects were becoming wan and passionless from lack of change and movement; we yearned for the presence even of strangers, to break up the dullness and uniformity, and make us feel that we had an interest in the living world, and that our love, sweet as it was in seclusion, was sweeter still as a bond that linked us to the great family, from which in our desolate retreat we felt ourselves entirely cut off.