“If you are not engaged in writing to your mistress,” said he, “come down and join us in a ramble.”
“And though I were,” I replied, “I could not resist your challenge.” And down I flew—Glorvina laughing, sent me back for my hat, and we proceeded on our walk.
“This is an evening,” said I, looking at Glorvina, “worthy of the morning of the first of May, and we have seized it in that happy moment so exquisitly described by Collins:
“While now the bright hair’d sun
Sits on yon western tent, whose cloudy skirts
With brede etherial wove,
O’erhang his wavy bed.’”=>
“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.”