“Elinor relinquished her usual meetings with the family--she sat in her own apartment all the day, and most of the evening. It was a lonely turret projecting so far from the walls of the Castle, that there were windows, or rather casements, on three sides. There Elinor sat to catch the blast, let it blow as it would, and imagined she heard in its moanings the cries of drowning seamen. No music that her lute, or that which Margaret touched with a more powerful and brilliant finger, could wean her from this melancholy indulgence.
“Hush!” she would say to the females who attended her--“Hush! let me listen to the blast!--It waves many a banner spread for victory,--it sighs over many a head that has been laid low!”
“Her amazement that a being could be at once so gentle and so ferocious--her dread that the habits of his life must have converted the _angel of her wilderness_ into a brave but brutal seaman, estranged from the feelings that had rendered the beautiful boy so indulgent to her errors,--so propitiatory between her and her proud relatives,--so aidant in all her amusements,--so necessary to her very existence.--The tones of this dreamy life harmonized, awfully for Elinor, with the sound of the blast as it shook the turrets of the Castle, or swept the woods that groaned and bowed beneath its awful visitings. And this secluded life, intense feeling, and profound and heart-rooted secret of her silent passion, held perhaps fearful and indescribable alliance with that aberration of mind, that prostration at once of the heart and the intellect, that have been found to bring forth, according as the agents were impelled, “the savour of life unto life, or of death unto death.” She had all the intensity of passion, combined with all the devotedness of religion; but she knew not which way to steer, or what gale to follow. She trembled and shrunk from her doubtful pilotage, and the rudder was left to the mercy of the winds and waves. Slender mercy do those experience who commit themselves to the tempests of the mental world--better if they had sunk at once amid the strife of the dark waters in their wild and wintry rage; there they would soon have arrived at the haven where they would be secure.