Melmoth the Wanderer, Vol. 3
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 intreating 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 shew 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 to-night 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.”

“The stranger again directed the telescope towards the shore of India, from which they were not far distant, and Immalee again exclaimed in rapture, “Alive and more beautiful than ever!—all living, thinking things!—their very walk thinks. No mute fishes, and senseless trees, but wonderful 
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