But Wilfrid now encountered the wall of brass for which he had been seeking up and down the earth.  He went impetuously to Seraphita, meaning to express the whole force and bearing of a passion under which he bounded like the fabled horse beneath the iron horseman, firm in his saddle, whom nothing moves while the efforts of the fiery animal only made the rider heavier and more solid.  He sought her to relate his life,—­to prove the grandeur of his soul by the grandeur of his faults, to show the ruins of his desert.  But no sooner had he crossed her threshold, and found himself within the zone of those eyes of scintillating azure, that met no limits forward and left none behind, than he grew calm and submissive, as a lion, springing on his prey in the plains of Africa, receives from the wings of the wind a message of love, and stops his bound.  A gulf opened before him, into which his frenzied words fell and disappeared, and from which uprose a voice which changed his being; he became as a child, a child of sixteen, timid and frightened before this maiden with serene brow, this white figure whose inalterable calm was like the cruel impassibility of human justice.  The combat between them had never ceased until this evening, when with a glance she brought him down, as a falcon making his dizzy spirals in the air around his prey causes it to fall stupefied to earth, before carrying it to his eyrie.

We may note within ourselves many a long struggle the end of which is one of our own actions,—­struggles which are, as it were, the reverse side of humanity.  This reverse side belongs to God; the obverse side to men.  More than once Seraphita had proved to Wilfrid that she knew this hidden and ever varied side, which is to the majority of men a second being.  Often she said to him in her dove-like voice:  “Why all this vehemence?” when on his way to her he had sworn she should be his.  Wilfrid was, however, strong enough to raise the cry of revolt to which he had given utterance in Monsieur Becker’s study.  The narrative of the old pastor had calmed him.  Sceptical and derisive as he was, he saw belief like a sidereal brilliance dawning on his life.  He asked himself if Seraphita were not an exile from the higher spheres seeking the homeward way.  The fanciful deifications of all ordinary lovers he could not give to this lily of Norway in whose divinity he believed.  Why lived she here beside this fiord?  What did she?  Questions that received no answer filled his mind.  Above all, what was about to happen between them?  What fate had brought him there?  To him, Seraphita was the motionless marble, light nevertheless as a vapor, which Minna had seen that day poised above the precipices of the Falberg.  Could she thus stand on the edge of all gulfs without danger, without a tremor of the arching eyebrows, or a quiver of the light of the eye?  If his love was to be without hope, it was not without curiosity.