Page:Idalia, by 'Ouida' volume 2.djvu/117

106 paradise; where the world was dead, but the spirit of God moved on the waters.

Passion was stilled here; love was silenced; the chastened solemnity, the purity of its mysterious divinity, had no affinity with the fevered dreams and sensuous sweetness of mortal desires. The warm poetic voluptuous light and colour of the land that they had left were the associates of passion; here it was hushed, and cast back in mute and nameless pain on its own knowledge of its own mortality; here there were rather felt "the pain of finite hearts that yearn" for things dreamt of and never found; the vagueness of far-reaching futile Promethean thirst; the impulse, and the despair, of immortality.

The boat paused in the midst of the still, violet, lake-like water. Where he lay at her feet, he looked upward to her through the ethereal light that floated round them, and seemed to sever them from earth.

"Would to God I could die now!"

The words broke unconsciously from him rather in the instinct of the moment than in conscious utterance. Her eyes met his, in them that dreamy and beautiful light that seemed to float in unshed tears. She laid her hand one moment on his