When it was over, she looked up to him; pale, languid, but her eyes
were two glistening fountains of an unspeakable love, full of sorrow
and full of gratitude.--The exhausting loss of blood was spreading her
soul asunder in sighs. Thiennette was dissolved into inexpressible
softness; and the heart lacerated by so many years, by so many arrows,
was plunging with all its wounds in warm streams of tears, to be
healed, as chapped flutes close together by lying in water, and get
back their tones. Before such a magic form, before such a pure,
heavenly love, her sympathizing friend was melted between the flames of
joy and grief; and sank, with stifled voice, and bent down by love and
rapture, on the pale, angelic face, the lips of which he timidly
pressed, but did not kiss, till all-powerful Love bound its girdles
round them, and drew the two closer and closer together, and their two
souls, like two tears, melted into one. O now, when it struck twelve,
the hour of death, did not the lover fancy that her lips were drawing
his soul away, and all the fibres and all the nerves of his life closed
spasmodically round the last heart in this world, round the last
rapture of existence.... Yes, happy man, thou didst express thy love;
for in thy love thou thoughtest to die....
However, he did not die. After midnight, there floated a balmy morning
air through the shaken flowers, and the whole spring was breathing.
The blissful lover, setting bounds even to his sea of joy, reminded
his delicate beloved, who was now his bride, of the dangers from
night-cold; and himself of the longer night-cold of Death, which was
now for long years passed over.--Innocent and blessed, they rose
from the grove of their betrothment, from its dust broken by white
acacia-flowers and straggling moonbeams. And without, they felt as if a
whole wide Past had sunk away in a convulsion of the world; all was
new, light, and young. The sky stood full of glittering dew-drops from
the everlasting Morning; and the stars quivered joyfully asunder, and
sank, resolved into beams, down into the hearts of men.--The Moon, with
her fountain of light, had overspread and kindled all the garden, and
was hanging above in a starless blue, as if she had consumed the
nearest stars; and she seemed like a smaller wandering Spring, like a
Christ's-face smiling in love of man.--
Under this light they looked at one another for the first time after
the first words of love; and the sky gleamed magically down on the
disordered features with which the first rapture of love was still
standing written on their faces....
Dream, ye beloved, as ye wake, happy as in Paradise, innocent as in
Paradise!
SIXTH LETTER-BOX.
Office-impost.--One of the Most Important of Petitions.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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