Chapter 10 - Page 2

on the ground stunned by his fall. He was not materially hurt, a
little fresh water soon recovered him. I was struck by his exceeding
beauty, and as he spoke to thank me the sweet but melancholy cadence
of his voice brought tears into my eyes.

A short conversation passed between us, but the next day he again
stopped at my cottage and by degrees an intimacy grew between us. It
was strange to him to see a female in extreme youth, I was not yet
twenty, evidently belonging to the first classes of society &
possessing every accomplishment an excellent education could bestow,
living alone on a desolate health [_sic_]--One on whose forehead the
impress of grief was strongly marked, and whose words and motions
betrayed that her thoughts did not follow them but were intent on far
other ideas; bitter and overwhelming miseries. I was dressed also in a
whimsical nunlike habit which denoted that I did not retire to
solitude from necessity, but that I might indulge in a luxury of
grief, and fanciful seclusion.

He soon took great interest in me, and sometimes forgot his own grief
to sit beside me and endeavour to cheer me. He could not fail to
interest even one who had shut herself from the whole world, whose
hope was death, and who lived only with the departed. His personal
beauty; his conversation which glowed with imagination and
sensibility; the poetry that seemed to hang upon his lips and to make
the very air mute to listen to him were charms that no one could
resist. He was younger, less worn, more passionless than my father and
in no degree reminded me of him: he suffered under immediate grief yet
its gentle influence instead of calling feelings otherwise dormant
into action, seemed only to veil that which otherwise would have been
too dazzling for me. When we were together I spoke little yet my
selfish mind was sometimes borne away by the rapid course of his
ideas; I would lift my eyes with momentary brilliancy until memories
that never died and seldom slept would recur, and a tear would dim
them.

Woodville for ever tried to lead me to the contemplation of what is
beautiful and happy in the world.[59] His own mind was constitunially
[_sic_] bent to a former belief in good [rather] than in evil and this
feeling which must even exhilirate the hopeless ever shone forth in
his words. He would talk of the wonderful powers of man, of their
present state and of their hopes: of what they had been and what they
were, and when reason could no longer guide him, his imagination as if
inspired shed light on the obscurity that veils the past and the
future. He loved to dwell on what might have been the state of the
earth before man lived on it, and how he first arose and gradually
became the strange,