scious embrace, which still tingled through every nerve of his frame, all conspired with the delicious emotion which he now experienced at her presence and her contact, to intoxicate and inflame him. Oh, those burning moments in love, when romance has just mellowed into passion, and without losing any thing of its luxurious vagueness, mingles the enthusiasm of its dreams with the ardent desires of reality and earth! That is the exact time, when love has reached its highest point—when all feelings, all thoughts, the whole soul, and the whole mind are seized and engrossed—when every difficulty weighed in the opposite scale seems lighter than dust—when to renounce the object beloved, is the most deadly and lasting sacrifice—and when in so many breasts, where honour, conscience, virtue, are far stronger than we can believe them ever to have been in a criminal like Clifford, honour, conscience, virtue, have perished at once and suddenly into ashes before that mighty and irresistible fire.
The servant, who had had previous opportuni-
