Imogen | Page 6

business to have
pleaded the cause of injured innocence or unmerited distress, his
generous sympathy and his manly persuasion must have won all hearts.
Had he solicited the pursuit of rectitude and happiness, his ingenuous
importunity could not have failed of success. But where the mind is too
deeply interested, there it is that the faculties are most treacherous.
Ardent were the sighs of Edwin, but his voice refused its assistance,
and his tongue faultered under the attempts that he made. Fluent and
voluble upon all other subjects, upon this he hesitated. For the first time
he was dissatisfied with the expressions that nature dictated. For the
first time he dreaded to utter the honest wishes of his heart,
apprehensive that he might do violence to the native delicacy of
Imogen.
But he needed not have feared. Imogen was not blind to those
perfections which every mouth conspired to praise. Her heart was not
cold and unimpassioned; she could not see these perfections, united
with youth and personal beauty, without being attracted. The accents of
Edwin were music to her ear. The tale that Edwin told, interested her
twice as much as what she heard from vulgar lips. To wander with
Edwin along the flowery mead, to sit with Edwin in the cool alcove,
had charms for her for which she knew not how to account, and which
she was at first unwilling to acknowledge to her own heart. When she
heard of the feats of the generous lover, his gallantry in the rural sports,
and his reverence for the fair, it was under the amiable figure of Edwin
that he came painted to her treacherous imagination. She was a stranger
to artifice and disguise, and the renown of Edwin was to her the feast of
the soul, and with visible satisfaction she dwelt upon his praise. Even in
sleep her dreams were of the deserving shepherd. The delusive
pleasures that follow in the train of dark-browed night, all told of

Edwin. The unreal mockery of that capricious being, who cheats us
with scenes of fictitious wretchedness, was full of the unmerited
calamities, the heartbreaking woe, or the untimely death of Edwin.
From Edwin therefore the language of love would have created no
disgust. Imogen was not heedless and indiscreet; she would not have
sacrificed the dignity of innocence. Imogen was not coy; she would not
have treated her admirer with affected disdain. She had no guard but
virgin modesty and that conscious worth, _that would be wooed, and
not unsought be won_.
Such was the yet immature attachment of our two lovers, when an
anniversary of religious mirth summoned them, together with their
neighbour shepherds of the adjacent hamlet, to the spot which had long
been consecrated to rural sports and guiltless festivity, near the village
of Ruthyn. The sun shone with unusual splendour; the Druidical
temples, composed of immense and shapeless stones, heaped upon each
other by a power stupendous and incomprehensible, reflected back his
radiant beams. The glade, the place of destination to the frolic
shepherds, was shrouded beneath two venerable groves that encircled it
on either side. The eye could not pierce beyond them, and the
imagination was in a manner embosomed in the vale. There were the
quivering alder, the upright fir, and the venerable oak crowned with
sacred mistletoe. They grew upon a natural declivity that descended
every way towards the plain. The deep green of the larger trees was
fringed towards the bottom with the pleasing paleness of the willow.
From one of the groves a little rivulet glided across the plain, and was
intersected on one side by a stream that flowed into it from a point
equally distant from either extremity of its course. Both these streams
were bordered with willows. In a word, upon the face of this beautiful
spot all appeared tranquility and peace. It was without a path, and you
would imagine that no human footsteps had ever invaded the calmness
of its solitude. It was the eternal retreat of the venerable anchorite; it
was the uninhabited paradise in the midst of the trackless ocean.
Such was the spot where the shepherds and shepherdesses of a hundred
cots were now assembled. In the larger compartiments of the vale, the
more muscular and vigorous swains pursued the flying ball, or
contended in the swift-footed race. The bards, venerable for their age
and the snowy whiteness of their hair, sat upon a little eminence as

umpires of the sports. In the smaller compartiments, the swains,
mingled with the fair, danced along the level green, or flew, with a
velocity that beguiled the eager sight, beneath the extended arms of
their fellows. Here a few shepherds, apart from the rest, flung the
ponderous quoit that sung along the air. There two youths, stronger