a very few weeks and all was destroyed.  Like Psyche[21] I lived for awhile in an enchanted palace, amidst odours, and music, and every luxurious delight; when suddenly I was left on a barren rock; a wide ocean of despair rolled around me:  above all was black, and my eyes closed while I still inhabited a universal death.  Still I would not hurry on; I would pause for ever on the recollections of these happy weeks; I would repeat every word, and how many do I remember, record every enchantment of the faery habitation.  But, no, my tale must not pause; it must be as rapid as was my fate,—­I can only describe in short although strong expressions my precipitate and irremediable change from happiness to despair.[22]

CHAPTER IV

Among our most assiduous visitors was a young man of rank, well informed, and agreable in his person.  After we had spent a few weeks in London his attentions towards me became marked and his visits more frequent.  I was too much taken up by my own occupations and feelings to attend much to this, and then indeed I hardly noticed more than the bare surface of events as they passed around me; but I now remember that my father was restless and uneasy whenever this person visited us, and when we talked together watched us with the greatest apparent anxiety although he himself maintained a profound silence.  At length these obnoxious visits suddenly ceased altogether, but from that moment I must date the change of my father:  a change that to remember makes me shudder and then filled me with the deepest grief.  There were no degrees which could break my fall from happiness to misery; it was as the stroke of lightning—­sudden and entire.[23] Alas!  I now met frowns where before I had been welcomed only with smiles:  he, my beloved father, shunned me, and either treated me with harshness or a more heart-breaking coldness.  We took no more sweet counsel together; and when I tried to win him again to me, his anger, and the terrible emotions that he exhibited drove me to silence and tears.

And this was sudden.  The day before we had passed alone together in the country; I remember we had talked of future travels that we should undertake together—.  There was an eager delight in our tones and gestures that could only spring from deep & mutual love joined to the most unrestrained confidence[;] and now the next day, the next hour, I saw his brows contracted, his eyes fixed in sullen fierceness on the ground, and his voice so gentle and so dear made me shiver when he addressed me.  Often, when my wandering fancy brought by its various images now consolation and now aggravation of grief to my heart,[24] I have compared myself to Proserpine who was gaily and heedlessly gathering flowers on the sweet plain of Enna, when the King of Hell snatched her away to the abodes of death and misery.  Alas!  I who so lately knew of nought but the joy of life; who had slept only