I was not at the time sufficiently composed to understand my own
feelings. I felt as one just relieved from a heavy burden, who breathes
freely, relaxes his contracted muscles, and walks to and fro in his
strength, as though he could devour space, and inhale all the air of
heaven. My own heart was the burden of which I had been relieved, and,
in giving it to another, I felt as if I had for the first time entered
into the fulness of life. Man is so truly born to love, that it is only
when he has the consciousness of loving fully and entirely that he
feels himself really a man. Until then he is disturbed and restless,
inconstant and wandering in his thoughts; but from thenceforward all
his waverings cease, he feels at rest, and sees his destiny before him.
I sat down upon the ivy-covered wall of a high dilapidated terrace
which overlooked the lake. My eyes wandered over the bright expanse of
water and the luminous immensity of the sky; they were so well blended
in the azure line of the horizon that it would have been impossible to
define where the sky commenced, and where the lake terminated. I seemed
to float in the pure ether, or to be merged in a universal ocean. But
the inward joy which inundated my soul was far more infinite, radiant,
and incommensurate, than the atmosphere with which I seemed to mingle.
I could not have defined my joy, or rather my inward serenity. It was
as some unfathomable secret revealed to me by feelings instead of
words,--as the sensation of the eye passing from darkness into light,
or as the rapture of some mystical soul, secure in the possession of
its God. It was dazzling light, intoxication without giddiness, repose
without heaviness, or immobility. I could have lived on thus during as
many thousand years as there were ripples on the lake, or sands upon
its shores, without perceiving that more seconds had elapsed than were
required for a single respiration. When the immortal dwellers in heaven
first lose the consciousness of the duration of time, they must feel
thus; it was an immutable thought, in the eternity of an instant.