Complex Audley (Volume 1); Or, Hands Not Hearts

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated.1841 Excerpt: ... CHAPTER XIII. Dudley's Return To England. The joys of meeting pay the pangs of absence: Else who could bear it? When thy lov'd sight shall bless my eyes again, Then will I own I ought not to complain, Since that sweet hour is worth whole years of pain. Howe's Tamerlane. Now is the hour that wakens fond desire In men at sea, and melts their thoughtful hearts. Carey's Dante. But when The tidings came that she whom he had wooed Was wedded to another, and his heart Was forced to rend away its only hope; Then, pity could have scarcely found on earth An object worthier of regard than he, In the transition of that bitter hour. Wordsworth. Byron says--Pass we the long, unvarying course, the track Oft trod, that never leaves a trace behind; Pass we the calm, the gale, the change, the tack, And each well-known caprice of wave and wind; Pass we the joys and sorrows sailors find, Coop'd in their winged sea-girt citadel; The foul, the fair, the contrary, the kind, As breezes rise and fall and billows swell, Till on some jocund morn--lo, land! and all is well. Pass we, therefore, the Atlantic, and all its world of waves. It is impossible to describe the thrill of joy Dudley felt at once more greeting the white cliffs of Albion. Time and absence had effected no chill in the ardour of his feelings. The vessel ran by the Needles, and anchored at Spithead. His feeling was an alternation of rapture and misery; at one moment he was exulting in the anticipation of clasping Constance within his arms--and the next recalling to his mind the often repeated disappointments he had been subjected to. With a feverish anxiety to return home, again to see her who had never or rarely been absent from his thoughts, whose image had pursued him in every change of situation, he immediately la...