“O! that beautiful ode!” exclaimed Glorvina, with all her wildest enthusiasm--“never can I read--never hear it repeated but with emotion. The perusal of Ossian’s ‘Song of Other Times,’ the breezy respiration of my harp at twilight, the last pale rose that outlives its season, and bears on its faded breast the frozen tears of the wintry dawn, and Collins’s ‘Ode to Evening,’ awaken in my heart and fancy the same train of indescribable feeling, of exquisite, yet unspeakable sensation. Alas! the solitary pleasure of feeling thus alone the utter impossibility of conveying to the bosom of another those ecstatic emotions by which our own is sublimed.” While my very soul followed this brilliant comet to her perihelion of sentiment and imagination, I fixed my eyes on her “mind-illumin’d face,” and said, “And is expression then necessary for the conveyance of such profound, such exquisite feeling? May not the similarity of a refined organization exist between souls, and produce that mutual intelligence which sets the necessity of cold, verbal expression at defiance? May not the sympathy of a kindred sensibility in the bosom of another, meet and enjoy those delicious feelings by which yours is warmed, and, sinking beneath the inadequacy of language to give them birth, feel like you, in silent and sacred emotion?” “Perhaps,” said the priest, with his usual simplicity, “this sacred sympathy, between two refined and elevated souls, in the sublime and beautiful of the moral and natural world, approaches nearest to the rapturous and pure emotions which uncreated spirits may be supposed to feel in their heavenly communion, than any other human sentiment with which we are acquainted.” For all the looks of blandishment which ever flung their spell from beauty’s eye, I would not have exchanged the glance which Glorvina at that moment cast on me. While the priest, who seemed to have been following up the train of thought awakened by our preceding observations, abruptly added, after a silence of some minutes-- “There is a species of metaphorical taste, if I may be allowed the expression, whose admiration for certain objects is not deducible from the established rules of beauty, order, or even truth; which _should_ be the basis of our approbation; yet which ever brings with it a sensation of more lively pleasure; as for instance, a chromatic passion in music will awaken a thrill of delight which a simple chord could never effect.” “Nor would the most self-evident truth,” said I, “awaken so vivid a sensation, as when we find some sentiment of the soul illustrated by some law or principle in science. To an axiom we announce our assent, but we lavish our most enthusiastic approbation when Rosseau tells us that ‘Les ames humaines veulent etre accomplies pour valoir toute leurs prix, et la force unie des ames _comme celles des l’armes d’un aimant artificiel_, est incomparablement plus grands que la somme de leurs force particulier.’”