"As I lingered before this fair shadow, I heard my name pronounced, and, turning, beheld the not less fair original, the daughter of my host. Now do not fear a catalogue of feminine graces, or a lengthened romance of the heart, tedious with such platitudes as have been Elysium to the actors, and weariness to the audience, ever since the world began. The Enchanted Isles wear no enchantment to unanointed vision; their skies of Paradise are fog, their angels Harpies, perchance, or harsh-throated Sirens. Besides, we can never describe correctly those whom we love, because we see them through the heart; and the heart's optics have no technology. It is enough to say, that, from almost the first time I looked upon Blanche, I felt that I had at last found the gift rarely accorded to us here,--the fulfilment of a promise hidden in every heart, but often waited for in vain. Hitherto my all-sufficing self-hood had never been stirred by the mighty touch of Love. I had been amused by trivial and superficial affections, like the gay triflers of whom Rasselas says, 'They fancied they were in love, when in truth they were only idle.' But that sentiment which is never twice inspired, that new birth of 'A soul within the soul, evolving it sublimely,' had never until now wakened my pulses and opened my eyes to the higher and holier heritage. Perhaps you doubt that Psychal fetters may be forged in a moment's heat; but I believe that the love which is deepest and most sacred, and which Plato calls the memory of divine beings whom we knew in some anterior life, that recognition of kindred natures which precedes reason and asks no leave of the understanding, is not a gradual and cautious attraction, like the growth of a coral reef, but sudden and magnetic as the coalescence of two drops of mercury.