How strangely and how suddenly with thee became that world evermore connected! What the delusion of the stage was to others, thy presence was to me.

My life, too, seemed to centre into those short hours, and from thy lips I heard a music, mute to all ears but mine.

I sit in the room where my father dwelt.

Here, on that happy night, forgetting why THEY were so happy, I shrunk into the shadow, and sought to guess what thou wert to me; and my mother's low voice woke me, and I crept to my father's side, close--close, from fear of my own thoughts.
"Ah! sweet and sad was the morrow to that night, when thy lips warned me of the future.

An orphan now,--what is there that lives for me to think of, to dream upon, to revere, but thou! "How tenderly thou hast rebuked me for the grievous wrong that my thoughts did thee! Why should I have shuddered to feel thee glancing upon my thoughts like the beam on the solitary tree, to which thou didst once liken me so well?
It was--it was, that, like the tree, I struggled for the light, and the light came.