Melmoth the Wanderer by Charles Maturin

Più non ho la dolce speranza. / - Didone

Seven mornings and evenings Immalee paced the sands of her lonely isle, without seeing the stranger. She had still his promise to console her, that they should meet in the world of suffering; and this she repeated to herself as if it was full of hope and consolation. In this interval she tried to educate herself for her introduction into this world, and it was beautiful to see her attempting, from vegetable and animal analogies, to form some image of the incomprehensible destiny of man. In the shade she watched the withering flower.

-- "The blood that ran red through its veins yesterday is purple today, and will be black and dry tomorrow," she said; "but it feels no pain -- it dies patiently -- and the ranunculus and tulip near it are untouched by grief for their companion, or their colours would not be so resplendent. But can it be thus in the world that thinks? Could I see him wither and die, without withering and dying along with him. Oh no! when that flower fades, I will be the dew that falls over him!"

She attempted to enlarge her comprehension, by observing the animal world. A young loxia had fallen dead from its pendent nest; and Immalee, looking into the aperture which that intelligent bird forms at the lower extremity of the nest to secure it from birds of prey, perceived the old ones with fireflies in their small beaks, their young one lying dead before them. At this sight Immalee burst into tears.

-- "Ah! you cannot weep," she said, "what an advantage I have over you! You eat, though your young one, your own one, is dead; but could I ever drink of the milk of the cocoa, if he could no longer taste it? I begin to comprehend what he said -- to think, then, is to suffer -- and a world of thought must be a world of pain! But how delicious are these tears! Formerly I wept for pleasure -- but there is a pain sweeter than pleasure, that I never felt till I beheld him. Oh! who would not think, to have the joy of tears?"

But Immalee did not occupy this interval solely in reflection; a new anxiety began to agitate her; and in the intervals of her meditation and her tears, she searched with avidity for the most glowing and fantastically wreathed shells to deck her arms and hair with. She changed her drapery of flowers every day, and never thought them fresh after the first hour; then she filled her largest shells with the most limpid water, and her hollow coconuts with the most delicious figs, interspersed with roses, and arranged them picturesquely on the stone bench of the ruined pagoda. The time, however, passed over without the arrival of the stranger, and Immalee, on visiting her fairy banquet the next day, wept over the withered fruit, but dried her eyes, and hastened to replace them.

She was thus employed on the eighth morning, when she saw the stranger approach; and the wild and innocent delight with which she bounded towards him, excited in him for a moment a feeling of gloomy and reluctant compunction, which Immalee's quick susceptibility traced in his pausing step and averted eye. She stood trembling in lovely and pleading diffidence, as if entreating pardon for an unconscious offence, and asking permission to approach by the very attitude in which she forbore it, while tears stood in her eyes ready to fall at another repelling motion. This sight "whetted his almost blunted purpose. " She must learn to suffer, to qualify her to become my pupil, he thought. "Immalee, you weep," he added, approaching her.

"Oh yes! " said Immalee, smiling like a spring morning through her tears; "you are to teach me to suffer, and I shall soon be very fit for your world -- but I had rather weep for you, than smile on a thousand roses."

"Immalee," said the stranger, repelling the tenderness that melted him in spite of himself, "Immalee, I come to show you something of the world of thought you are so anxious to inhabit, and of which you must soon become an inmate. Ascend this hill where the palm-trees are clustering, and you shall see a glimpse of part of it."

"But I would like to see the whole, and all at once! " said Immalee, with the natural avidity of thirsty and unfed intellect, that believes it can swallow all things, and digest all things.

"The whole, and all at once! " said her conductor, turning to smile at her as she bounded after him, breathless and glowing with newly excited feeling. "I doubt the part you will see tonight will be more than enough to satiate even your curiosity."

As he spoke he drew a tube from his vest, and bid her apply it to her sight. The Indian obeyed him; but, after gazing a moment, uttered the emphatic exclamation, "I am there! -- or are they here? " and sunk on the earth in a frenzy of delight. She rose again in a moment, and eagerly seizing the telescope, applied it in a wrong direction, which disclosed merely the sea to her view, and exclaimed sadly, "Gone! -- gone -- all that beautiful world lived and died in a moment -- all that I love die so -- my dearest roses live not half so long as those I neglect -- you were absent for seven moons since I first saw you, and the beautiful world lived only a moment."