It floated around me, like the tones of some rare instrument, unseen by the hearer; for, beautiful as she was, you could not think of her, or of her loveliness, while she was speaking; it was that sweetly wonderful voice, seemingly abstracted from herself, pouring forth the soft current of its exquisite cadence, which alone absorbed the attention.

Like that one of Coleridge's heroines, you could half feel, half fancy, that it had a separate being of its own, a spiritual presence manifested to but one of the senses; a living something, whose mode of existence was for the ear alone .-- (See Memoirs of Maria Eleonora Schoning.) "But what shall I say of the mind?
What of the spirit, the resident divinity of so fair a temple?
Vanity, vanity, all was vanity; a miserable, personal vanity, too, unrelieved by one noble aspiration, one generous feeling; the whited sepulchre spoken of of old, beautiful without, but dark and unseemly within.
"I look back with wonder and astonishment to that period of my life, when such a being claimed and received the entire devotion of my heart.
Her idea blended with or predominated over all others.

It was the common centre in my mind from which all the radii of thought had their direction; the nucleus around which I had gathered all that my ardent imagination could conceive, or a memory stored with all the delicious dreams of poetry and romances could embody, of female excellence and purity and constancy.
"It is idle to talk of the superior attractions of intellectual beauty, when compared with mere external loveliness.

The mind, invisible and complicated and indefinite, does not address itself directly to the senses.

It is comprehended only by its similitude in others.