O, Heaven! what is
your will with us?"
Professor Halle has said a terrible thing: "Woman is the nervous part of
humanity, man the muscular." Humboldt himself, that serious thinker, has
said that an invisible atmosphere surrounds the human nerves. I do not
quote the dreamers who watch the flight of Spallanzani's bat, and who
think they have found a sixth sense in nature. Such as nature is, her
mysteries are terrible enough, her powers mighty enough, that nature
which creates us, mocks at us, and kills us, without deepening the
shadows that surround us. But where is the man who has lived who will
deny woman's power over us, if he has ever taken leave of a beautiful
dancer with trembling hands. If he has ever felt that indefinable
enervating magnetism which, in the midst of the dance, under the
influence of the sound of music, and the warmth that makes all else seem
cold, that comes from a young woman, that electrifies her and leaps from
her to him as the perfume of aloes from the swinging censer? I was struck
with stupor. I was familiar with a certain sensation similar to
drunkenness, which characterizes love; I knew that it was the aureole
which crowned the well-beloved. But that she should excite such
heart-throbs, that she should evoke such fantoms with nothing but her
beauty, her flowers, her motley costume, and a certain trick of turning
she had learned from some merry-andrew; and that without a word, without
a thought, without even appearing to know it! What was chaos if it
required seven days to transform it?
It was not love, however, that I felt, and I do not know how to describe
it unless I call it thirst.
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