CHAPTER XXIV.
"it is a fearful thing
To love as I love thee; to feel the world,
The beautiful, the bright, joy-giving world,
A blank without thee.***
He is the star, round which my thoughts revolve
Like satellites. My father! can it be,
That thine, the unceasing love of many years,
Doth not so fill my heart as this strange guest?"
The Ancestress.
What an odd thing experience is!—now turning over so rapidly the book of life, now writing so much on a single leaf. We hear of the head turning grey in a single night,—the same change passes over the heart. Affection is the tyrant of a woman, and only bids her to the banquet to suspend a cutting sword over her head, which a word, a look may call down to inflict the wound that strikes to the death, or heals, but with a scar. Could we fling back the veil which nature and society alike draw over her feelings, how much of sorrow—unsuspected because unexpressed—would be found!
