Page:Eugene Aram vol 3 - Lytton (1832).djvu/276

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268
EUGENE ARAM.

did so, I felt haunted, as by a holy spirit, for the rest of the day—an unquiet yet delicious emotion agitated all within—the south wind stirred the dark waters of my mind, but it passed, and all became hushed again. It was not for two years from the time we first saw each other, that accident brought us closely together. I pass over the rest. We loved! Yet oh what struggles were mine during the progress of that love! How unnatural did it seem to me to yield to a passion that united me with my kind; and as I loved her more, how far more urgent grew my fear of the future! That which had almost slept before awoke again to terrible life. The soil that covered the past might be riven, the dead awake, and that ghastly chasm separate me for ever from her! What a doom, too, might I bring upon that breast which had begun so confidingly to love me! Often—often I resolved to fly—to forsake her—to seek some desert spot in the distant parts of the world, and never to be betrayed again into human emotions! But as the bird flutters