The last stanza he sung in a laughing, triumphant tone, which resounded above the loud clang of his guitar, like the jeering laugh of Till Eulenspiegel.  Then slinging his guitar over his shoulder, he took off his green cap, and made a leg to the ladies, in the style of Gil Blas; waved his hand in the air, and walked quickly down the valley, singing “Ade!  Ade!  Ade!”

CHAPTER VIII.  THE FOUNTAIN OF OBLIVION.

The power of magic in the Middle Ages created monsters, who followed the unhappy magician everywhere.  The power of Love in all ages creates angels, who likewise follow the happy or unhappy lover everywhere, even in his dreams.  By such an angel was Paul Flemming now haunted, both when he waked and when he slept.  He walked as in a dream; and was hardly conscious of the presence of those around him.  A sweet face looked at him from every page of every book he read; and it was the face of Mary Ashburton! a sweet voice spake to him in every sound he heard; and it was the voice of Mary Ashburton!  Day and night succeeded each other, with pleasant interchange of light and darkness; but to him thepassing of time was only as a dream.  When he arose in the morning, he thought only of her, and wondered if she were yet awake; and when he lay down at night he thought only of her, and how, like the Lady Christabel,

“Her gentle limbs she did undress,

And lay down in her loveliness.”

And the livelong day he was with her, either in reality or in day-dreams, hardly less real; for, in each delirious vision of his waking hours, her beauteous form passed like the form of Beatrice through Dante’s heaven; and, as he lay in the summer afternoon, and heard at times the sound of the wind in the trees, and the sound of Sabbath bells ascending up to heaven, holy wishes and prayers ascended with them from his inmost soul, beseeching that he might not love in vain!  And whenever, in silence and alone, he looked into the silent, lonely countenance of Night, he recalled the impassioned lines of Plato;—­

“Lookest thou at the stars?  If I were heaven,

With all the eyes of heaven would I look down on thee!”

O how beautiful it is to love!  Even thou, that sneerest at this page, and laughest in cold indifference or scorn if others are near thee, thou, too, must acknowledge its truth when thou art alone; and confess, that a foolish world is prone to laugh in public, at what in private it reverences, as one of the highest impulses of our nature,—­namely, Love!

One by one the objects of our affection depart from us.  But our affections remain, and like vines stretch forth their broken, wounded tendrils for support.  The bleeding heart needs a balm to heal it; and there is none but the love of its kind,—­none but the affection of a human heart!  Thus the wounded, broken affections of Flemming began to lift themselves from the dust and cling around this new object.