Love-Letters Between a Nobleman and His SisterBehn, Aphra
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Love-Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister
Behn, Aphra
Epistolary fiction, English
With much ado, with many a sigh, a panting heart, and many a
languishing look back towards happy _Bellfont_, I have recovered
_Dorillus_ his farm, where I threw me on a bed, and lay without
motion, and almost without life for two hours; till at last, through
all my sighs, my great concern, my torment, my love and rage broke
silence, and burst into all the different complaints both soft and mad
by turns, that ever possessed a soul extravagantly seized with frantic
love; ah, _Sylvia_, what did not I say? How did I not curse, and who
except my charming maid? For yet my _Sylvia_ is a maid: yes, yes, ye
envying powers, she is, and yet the sacred and inestimable treasure
was offered a trembling victim to the overjoyed and fancied deity, for
then and there I thought myself happier than a triumphing god; but
having overcome all difficulties, all the fatigues and toils of love’s
long sieges, vanquish’d the mighty phantom of the fair, the giant
honour, and routed all the numerous host of women’s little reasonings,
passed all the bounds of peevish modesty; nay, even all the loose and
silken counterscarps that fenced the sacred fort, and nothing stopped
my glorious pursuit: then, then, ye gods, just then, by an
over-transport, to fall just fainting before the surrendering gates,
unable to receive the yielding treasure! Oh _Sylvia_! What _demon_,
malicious at my glory, seized my vigour? What god, envious of my
mighty joy, rendered me a shameful object of his raillery? Snatched my
(till then) never failing power, and left me dying on thy charming
bosom. Heavens, how I lay! Silent with wonder, rage and ecstasy of
love, unable to complain, or rail, or storm, or seek for ease, but
with my sighs alone, which made up all my breath; my mad desires
remained, but all inactive, as age or death itself, as cold and
feeble, as unfit for joy, as if my youthful fire had long been past,
or _Sylvia_ had never been blest with charms. Tell me, thou wondrous
perfect creature, tell me, where lay the hidden witchcraft? Was
_Sylvia_’. beauty too divine to mix with mortal joys? Ah no, ‘twas
ravishing, but human all. Yet sure ‘twas so approaching to divinity,
as changed my fire to awful adoration, and all my wanton heat to
reverent contemplation.--But this is nonsense all, it was something
more that gave me rage, despair and torments insupportable: no, it was
no dull devotion, tame divinity, but mortal killing agony, unlucky
disappointment, unnatural impotence. Oh! I am lost, enchanted by some
magic spell: oh, what can _Sylvia_ say? What can she think of my fond
passion; she’ll swear it is all a cheat, I had it not. No, it could
not be; such tales I’ve often heard, as often laughed at too, of
disappointed lovers; would _Sylvia_ believe (as sure she may) mine was
excess of passion: what! My _Sylvia_! being arrived to all the joy of
love, just come to reap the glorious recompense, the full reward, the
heaven for all my sufferings, do I lie gazing only, and no more? A
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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