She must have
refined the void air of the earth when she entered it, with a breath of
the fragrant breezes, and gleam of the truant sunshine of her lost
Paradise! They must have strengthened and brightened, and must now be
strengthening and brightening with the slow lapse of mortal years,
until, in the time when earth itself will be an Eden, they shall be made
one again with the hidden world of perfection, from which they are yet
separated. So that, even now, as I look forth over the landscape, the
light that I behold has in it a glow of Paradise, and this flower that I
gather a breath of the fragrance that once stole over the senses of my
first mother, Eve!'
Though she paused here, as if in expectation of an answer, the Goth
preserved an unbroken silence. Neither by nature nor position was he
capable of partaking the wild fancies and aspiring thoughts, drawn by
the influences of the external world from their concealment in
Antonina's heart.
The mystery of his present situation; his vague remembrance of the
duties he had abandoned; the uncertainty of his future fortunes and
future fate; the presence of the lonely being so inseparably connected
with his past emotions and his existence to come, so strangely
attractive by her sex, her age, her person, her misfortunes, and her
endowments; all contributed to bewilder his faculties.
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