How many varied degrees of the passion called love there are, can never be ascertained, for one human being cannot experience the feelings of another. The love--so called--felt by the generality of mortals, everyday, practical men and women, is so essentially different from that which takes root in a highly passionate, imaginative temperament, refined and intellectual, that the two have no affinity one with the other. This last passion is known but to few, and apart from themselves, can be imagined by none. The world could not understand this love, it is of a different nature from anything they can know; they would laugh at, while they disbelieved in it. It has been asserted that this highly-wrought passion, the ecstatic bliss of which, while it lasts, no earthly language could express, never ends happily. I believe that it never does. The dream comes to an end, and the heart's life with it. Perhaps nearly a whole existence has yet to be dragged through, but all enjoyment in the world and the world's things is gone, and nothing can ever again awaken a pulse in the veins, a thrill in the worn and beaten heart. The smile may sit upon the lip, the jest may issue from it; gay beaming glances may dart from the eye, and their hollowness is not suspected, nor the desolation that has long settled within. You who read this, may meet it in a spirit of dispute and ridicule: then it is because you cannot understand it. And be thankful that it is so--that to you the power, so fatally to love, has been spared. It was a passion of this latter and rare description which had taken root in the bosom of Adeline de Castella. She could not have loved as the world loves, for she was one of those who live but in the inward life. There was a mine of sentiment and poetry within her, and it wanted but a touch like this to awaken it. Now, she lived in the present; before, she had lived in the future; hereafter, she would live in the past. She rose in the morning, and there was no wish beyond the day, the seeing Mr. St. John; she retired to rest at night, only to dream of him, and to awake to the bliss of another day. Nature had never looked to her as it looked now: the grass had been green, but not of this green; the fragrance of the flowers had been fragrance, but they had not borne their present sweetness; the song of the birds, hitherto unmeaning, seemed now a carol of joyous praise to their Creator; there was music in the winds and in the fluttering breeze; there was rapture in the whole bright earth. Adeline was living in a dream, not of this world but of Paradise; it could be called nothing else; she was walking on the wings of the morning, treading on the yielding flowers. It was well for her that it was not destined to last; it is well for us all: or we should never ask, or wish, for the heaven that is to come.