Again one of those painful pauses with which his narrative was so often broken, occurred; and, with an energy that terrified her whom he addressed, Wacousta pursued—­“Clara de Haldimar, it was here—­in this garden—­this paradise —­this oasis of the rocks in which I now found myself, that I first saw and loved your mother.  Ha! you start:  you believe me now.—­Loved her!” he continued, after another short pause—­“oh, what a feeble word is love to express the concentration of mighty feelings that flowed like burning lava through my veins!  Who shall pretend to give a name to the emotion that ran thrillingly—­madly through my excited frame, when first I gazed on her, who, in every attribute of womanly beauty, realised all my fondest fancy ever painted?—­Listen to me, Clara,” he pursued, in a fiercer tone, and with a convulsive pressure of the form he still encircled:—­“If, in my younger days, my mind was alive to enterprise, and loved to contemplate danger in its most appalling forms, this was far from being the master passion of my soul; nay, it was the strong necessity I felt of pouring into some devoted bosom the overflowing fulness of my heart, that made me court in solitude those positions of danger with which the image of woman was ever associated.  How often, while tossed by the raging elements, now into the blue vault of heaven, now into the lowest gulfs of the sea, have I madly wished to press to my bounding bosom the being of my fancy’s creation, who, all enamoured and given to her love, should, even amid the danger that environed her, be alive but to one consciousness,—­that of being with him on whom her life’s hope alone reposed!  How often, too, while bending over some dark and threatening precipice, or standing on the utmost verge of some tall projecting cliff, my aching head (aching with the intenseness of its own conceptions) bared to the angry storm, and my eye fixed unshrinkingly on the boiling ocean far beneath my feet, has my whole soul—­my every faculty, been bent on that ideal beauty which controlled every sense!  Oh, imagination, how tyrannical is thy sway—­how exclusive thy power—­how insatiable thy thirst!  Surrounded by living beauty, I was insensible to its influence; for, with all the perfection that reality can attain on earth, there was ever to be found some deficiency, either physical or moral, that defaced the symmetry and destroyed the loveliness of the whole; but, no sooner didst thou, with magic wand, conjure up one of thy embodiments, than my heart became a sea of flame, and was consumed in the vastness of its own fires.

“It was in vain that my family sought to awaken me to a sense of the acknowledged loveliness of the daughters of more than one ancient house in the county, with one of whom an alliance was, in many respects, considered desirable.  Their beauty, or rather their whole, was insufficient to stir up into madness the dormant passions of my nature; and although my breast was like a glowing furnace, in which fancy