We both remained silent, until her eye accidentally meeting mine, a more “celestial rosy red” invested her cheek. She seated herself in the window, and I drew a chair and sat near her. All within was the softest gloom—all without the most solemn stillness. The gray vapours of twilight were already stealing amidst the illumined clouds that floated in the atmosphere—the sun’s golden beams no longer scattered round their rich suffusion; and the glow of retreating day was fading even from the horizon where its parting glories faintly lingered.
“It is a sweet hour,” said Glorvina, softly sighing.
“It is a boudoirizing hour,” said I.
“It is a golden one for a poetic heart,” she added.
“Or an enamoured one,” I returned. “It is the hour in which the soul best knows itself; when every low-thoughted care is excluded, and the pensive pleasures take possession of the dis solving heart.
“Ces douces lumières
Ces sombre certes
Sont les jours de la volupté.”
And what was the voluptas of Epicurus, but those refined and elegant enjoyments which must derive their spirit from virtue and from health; from a vivid fancy, susceptible feelings, and a cultivated mind; and which are never so fully tasted as in this sweet season of the day; then the influence of sentiment is buoyant over passion; the soul, alive to the sublimest impression, expands in the region of pure and elevated meditation: the passions, slumbering in the soft repose of Nature, leave the heart free to the reception of the purest, warmest, tenderest sentiments—when all is delicious melancholy, or pensive softness; when every vulgar wish is hushed, and a rapture, an indefinable rapture, thrills with sweet vibration on every nerve.”
“It is thus I have felt,” said the all-impassioned Glorvina, clasping her hands and fixing her humid eyes on mine—“thus, in the dearth of all kindred feeling, have I felt. But never, oh! till now—never!”—and she abruptly paused, and drooped her head on the back of my chair, over which my hand rested, and felt the soft pressure of her glowing cheek, while her balmy sigh breathed its odour on my lip.