Kisses! what kiss of the blind lips could match the kiss of those rapt tragic eyes!
Kisses are but the diminutives of the great word "love;" they are but the small change of passion, meteorites, star-dust of the great and terrible planet.
Their souls are swung high above time and space in one never-ending kiss,--the kiss of that predestined irrefragable union, of which meetings and partings and kisses and caresses and words, and every other fragmentary mode of expression, are but trivial accidents, to which distance is still nearness, and nearness is still distance.
Their love is a property of eternal elements. It is fated as the union of magnetic powers, it obeys chemic laws of irresistible combination. They are Isabel and Theophil,--that is their love; they are in the world together,--that is their marriage.
But passion will not be all day a tragedian. He has many moods. He is a great wit,--how bright, how bright, he makes the brain!--a merry comrade, a little, tender, silly child; and these two sad ones laughed together, too, in the still woods,--for was not the most exquisite humourist in the world their companion, love, who is all things by turns, and all things wise?
And they feasted together, wine and great grapes, spread out on the earth's green table; and they called each other silly, beautiful names, and they feigned sad little glad stories--and called the wood their home: this was their breakfast-oak, and that glade should be their great hall, and high, high up in yonder beech, where the squirrel was sitting, should be their secret little bed-chamber, hung in blue and green, with a ceiling of stars. They should climb it each night on a ladder of moonlight, and slide down from it each morning on the first strong rays of the sun. And sometimes if it frightened them with being too near heaven, they would seek out a dell of fine moss and creep close together into the arms of the kind earth-mother, and then sleep while the stars kept watch.
O, yes, it would be a wonderful life together.
Then suddenly the child's play would cease, as the birds stop singing with the coming of the stars, and silence would sweep over them again, and a great kiss would leap out of the silence, like a flame that lights up heaven from north to south, and they would hang together, lost in an anguish of desire.
The setting sun was turning the wood into halls of strange light, and spreading golden couches here and there in its deep recesses.
"Theophil..." sighed Isabel.