What an
enchanter is Passion! No wonder Ovid, who was a judge, made love so much
connected with his Metamorphoses. With infinite difficulty she had dared
to admit the idea of flying with his Grace; but when the idea was once
admitted, when she really had, once or twice, constantly dwelt on the
idea of at length being free from her tyrant, and perhaps about to
indulge in those beautiful affections for which she was formed, and of
which she had been rifled; when, I say, all this occurred, and her hero
diplomatised, and, in short, kept back; why, she had advanced one step,
without knowing it, to running away with another man.
It was unlucky that De Whiskerburg stepped in. An Englishman would not
have done. She knew them well, and despised them all; but he was new
(dangerous novelty), with a cast of feelings which, because they were
strange, she believed to be unhackneyed; and he was impassioned. We need
not go on.
So this star has dropped from out the heaven; so this precious pearl no
longer gleams among the jewels of society, and there she breathes in a
foreign land, among strange faces and stranger customs, and, when she
thinks of what is past, laughs at some present emptiness, and tries to
persuade her withering heart that the mind is independent of country,
and blood, and opinion.
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