noon
But when I am alone with Nature , methinks a sweet sound or a new-born flower has something of familiar power over those stored and deep impressions which do make her image , and it brings her more vividly before my eyes than any shape or face of her own sex , however beautiful it may be . There was also another trait in her character which , though arising in her weakness , not her virtues , yet perpetuated the more dreamlike and imaginary qualities of our passion : this was a melancholy superstition , developing itself in forebodings and omens which interested , because they were steeped at once in the poetry and in the deep sincerity of her nature . She was impressed with a strong and uncontrollable feeling that her fate was predestined to a dark course and an early end ; and she drew from all things around her something to feed the pensive character of her thoughts . The stillness of noon ; the holy and eloquent repose of twilight , its rosy sky and its soft air , its shadows and its dews , -- had equally for her heart a whisper and a spell . The wan stars , where , from the eldest time , man has shaped out a chart of the undiscoverable future ; the mysterious moon , to which the great ocean ministers from its untrodden shrines ; the winds , which traverse the vast air , pilgrims from an eternal home to an unpenetrated bourne ; the illimitable heavens , on which none ever gazed without a vague craving for something that the earth can not give , and a vague sense of a former existence in which that something was enjoyed ; the holy night ; that solemn and circling sleep , which seems , in its repose , to image our death , and in its living worlds to shadow forth the immortal realms which only through that death we can survey , -- all had , for the deep heart of Isora , a language of omen and of doom . Often would we wander alone , and for hours together , by the quiet and wild woods and streams that surrounded her retreat , and which we both loved so well ; and often , when the night closed over us , with my arm around her , and our lips so near that our atmosphere was our mutual breath , would she utter , in that voice which `` made the soul plant itself in the ears , '' the predictions which had nursed themselves at her heart . I remember one evening , in especial .