Page:The White Slave, or Memoirs of a Fugitive.djvu/50

 Yet short and uncertain as these visits were, they sufficed to create and to sustain a new and singular state of feeling. My wife was seldom with me, but her image was ever before my eyes, and appeared to make me regardless of all beside. Things seemed to pass as in a happy dream. The labor of the field was nothing; the lash of the overseer was scarcely felt. My mind became so occupied and as it were, filled up, with the pleasure which I found in our mutual affection, and by the anticipated delights of each successive interview, that it seemed to have no room for disagreeable emotions. Strong as was my passion, there was nothing in it, uneasy or unsatisfied. When I clasped the dear girl to my bosom, I seemed to have reached the height of human fruition. I was happy; greater happiness I could not imagine, and did not desire.

The intoxication of passion is the same in the slave and in the master; it is exquisite; and while it lasts, all-sufficient in itself. I found it so. With almost every thing to make me miserable, still was I happy, — for the excess of my passion rendered me insensible to any thing save its own indulgence.

But such ecstasies are unsuited to the human constitution. They are soon over, and perhaps are ever purchased at too dear a price; for they are but too apt to be succeeded by all the anguish of disappointed hope, and all the bitterness of deep despair. Still I look back with pleasure to that time. It is one of the bright spots of my existence which eager memory discovers in her retrospections, scattered and scarcely visible, — tiny islets of delight, surrounded on all sides, by a gloomy and tempestuous ocean.

We had been married about a fortnight. It was near midnight, and I was sitting before my door, waiting for my wife to come. The moon was full and bright; the sky was cloudless. I was still at the height and flood of my intoxication; and as I watched the planet, and admired her brightness, I gave thanks to heaven that the base tendencies of a servile condition, had not yet totally extinguished within me, all the higher and nobler emotions of man's nature.

Presently I observed a figure approaching. I should