Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: r—. FRAGMENT II. It was about this time that I began to be assured that Eleanor loved me. Those who have known what the consciousness of being beloved is, can imagine the sensations with which, in this instance, it dawned and brightened upon me. Oh ! there is no joy under heaven like the feeling of being loved! The gratifications of vanity—the triumphs of ambition—-sink into nothing in comparison with this; or, rather, they are all included in it. When we know that we are beloved by her whose affection we prize beyond all earthly—almost beyond all, desires;—when the sweet avowal still sounds in our ears, and the delicious consciousness is burning within our hearts; —then, indeed, have we reached the summit—the very apex—of all human enjoyment. Our gait is more buoyant—our port more lofty—and we look, as it were, with a kind of pitying contempt upon all we meet. I mean literally what I say.—Any one who has thus loved and been loved, must, in those moments of desperate joy, have often said to himself—" that man is not loved as I am—that man does not possess her affections !"—With me these feelings rose to their utmost height. She whom I esteemed the most gifted and lovely being whom it had ever been my lot to meet—she who for months had been the very life-pulse of my heart, the vivifying breath of my nostrils—she who had wound round every fibre of affection, who had so long engrossed me utterly, heart and mind, body and soul—she loved . me!—Thrown intimately as I had been into her society—inmated in the same dwelling—witnessing the development of her qualities and powers, as reserve softened into friendship, and friendship kindled into love;—living in constant intercourse for months with a creature like this,—how was it possible that my affection for her should not be of that ...