) The next day I called upon her; the acquaintance thus
commenced did not droop; and, notwithstanding our youth--for Lucy D----
was only seventeen, and I nearly a year younger--we soon loved, and with
a love, which, full of poesy and dreaming, as from our age it
necessarily must have been, was not less durable, nor less heart-felt,
than if it had arisen from the deeper and more earthly sources in which
later life only hoards its affections.
"Oh, God! how little did I think of what our young folly entailed upon
us! We delivered ourselves up to the dictates of our hearts, and forgot
that there was a future. Neither of us had any ulterior design; we did
not think--poor children that we were--of marriage, and settlements, and
consent of relations. We touched each other's hands, and were happy; we
read poetry together--and when we lifted up our eyes from the page,
those eyes met, and we did not know why our hearts beat so violently;
and at length, when we spake of love, and when we called each other Lucy
and ----; when we described all that we had thought in absence--and all
we had felt when present--when we sat with our hands locked each in
each--and at last, growing bolder, when in the still and quiet
loneliness of a summer twilight we exchanged our first kiss, we did not
dream that the world forbade what seemed to us so natural; nor--feeling
in our own hearts the impossibility of change--did we ever ask whether
this sweet and mystic state of existence was to last for ever!
"Lucy was an only child; her father was a man of wretched character.
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