Chapter 7 - Page 2

human creatures around me excited in
me no sympathy and I thought that the mighty change that the death of
your mother had wrought within me had rendered me callous to any
future impression. I saw the lovely and I did not love, I imagined
therefore that all warmth was extinguished in my heart except that
which led me ever to dwell on your then infantine image.

"It is a strange link in my fate that without having seen you I should
passionately love you. During my wanderings I never slept without
first calling down gentle dreams on your head. If I saw a lovely
woman, I thought, does my Mathilda resemble her? All delightful
things, sublime scenery, soft breezes, exquisite music seemed to me
associated with you and only through you to be pleasant to me. At
length I saw you. You appeared as the deity of a lovely region, the
ministering Angel of a Paradise to which of all human kind you
admitted only me. I dared hardly consider you as my daughter; your
beauty, artlessness and untaught wisdom seemed to belong to a higher
order of beings; your voice breathed forth only words of love: if
there was aught of earthly in you it was only what you derived from
the beauty of the world; you seemed to have gained a grace from the
mountain breezes--the waterfalls and the lake; and this was all of
earthly except your affections that you had; there was no dross, no
bad feeling in the composition. You yet even have not seen enough[36]
of the world to know the stupendous difference that exists between the
women we meet in dayly life and a nymph of the woods such as you were,
in whose eyes alone mankind may study for centuries & grow wiser &
purer. Those divine lights which shone on me as did those of Beatrice
upon Dante, and well might I say with him yet with what different
feelings

E quasi mi perdei gli occhi chini.

Can you wonder, Mathilda, that I dwelt on your looks, your words, your
motions, & drank in unmixed delight?

["]But I am afraid that I wander from my purpose. I must be more brief
for night draws on apace and all my hours in this house are counted.
Well, we removed to London, and still I felt only the peace of sinless
passion. You were ever with me, and I desired no more than to gaze on
your countenance, and to know that I was all the world to you; I was
lapped in a fool's paradise of enjoyment and security. Was my love
blamable? If it was I was ignorant of it; I desired only that which I
possessed, and if I enjoyed from your looks, and words, and most
innocent caresses a rapture usually excluded from the feelings of a
parent towards his child, yet no uneasiness, no wish, no casual idea
awoke me to a sense of guilt. I loved you as a human father might be
supposed to