It varied and exalted his rude emotions, for it was inspired, not alone by the beauty and youth that he saw, but by the pure thoughts, the artless eloquence that he heard.

And she--the forsaken daughter, the source whence the Northern warrior derived those new and higher sensations that had never animated him until now--regarded her protector, her first friend and companion, as her first love, with a devotion which, in its mingled and exalted nature, may be imagined by the mind, but can be but imperfectly depicted by the pen.

It was a devotion created of innocence and gratitude, of joy and sorrow, of apprehension and hope.
It was too fresh, too unworldly to own any upbraidings of artificial shame, any self-reproaches of artificial propriety.

It resembled in its essence, though not in its application, the devotion of the first daughters of the Fall to their brother-lords.
But it is now time that we return to the course of our narrative; although, ere we again enter on the stirring and rapid present, it will be necessary for a moment more to look back in another direction to the eventful past.
But it is not on peace, beauty, and pleasure that our observation now fixes itself.

It is to anger, disease, and crime--to the unappeasable and unwomanly Goisvintha, that we now revert.
Since the day when the violence of her conflicting emotions had deprived her of consciousness, at the moment of her decisive triumph over the scruples of Hermanric and the destiny of Antonina, a raging fever had visited on her some part of those bitter sufferings that she would fain have inflicted on others.