The Mysteries of Udolpho

Sometimes he called on St. Aubert, and sometimes on Valancourt; who

having, at length, convinced him that he had nothing to fear either for

himself, or his master; and having disposed of him, for the night, in a

cottage on the skirts of the woods, returned to sup with his friends,

on such sober fare as the monks thought it prudent to set before them.

While St. Aubert was too much indisposed to share it, Emily, in her

anxiety for her father, forgot herself; and Valancourt, silent and

thoughtful, yet never inattentive to them, appeared particularly

solicitous to accommodate and relieve St. Aubert, who often observed,

while his daughter was pressing him to eat, or adjusting the pillow she

had placed in the back of his arm-chair, that Valancourt fixed on her a

look of pensive tenderness, which he was not displeased to understand.

They separated at an early hour, and retired to their respective

apartments. Emily was shown to hers by a nun of the convent, whom she

was glad to dismiss, for her heart was melancholy, and her attention

so much abstracted, that conversation with a stranger was painful. She

thought her father daily declining, and attributed his present fatigue

more to the feeble state of his frame, than to the difficulty of the

journey. A train of gloomy ideas haunted her mind, till she fell asleep.

In about two hours after, she was awakened by the chiming of a bell, and

then heard quick steps pass along the gallery, into which her chamber

opened. She was so little accustomed to the manners of a convent, as to

be alarmed by this circumstance; her fears, ever alive for her father,

suggested that he was very ill, and she rose in haste to go to him.

Having paused, however, to let the persons in the gallery pass before

she opened her door, her thoughts, in the mean time, recovered from the

confusion of sleep, and she understood that the bell was the call of

the monks to prayers. It had now ceased, and, all being again still,

she forbore to go to St. Aubert's room. Her mind was not disposed

for immediate sleep, and the moon-light, that shone into her chamber,

invited her to open the casement, and look out upon the country.

It was a still and beautiful night, the sky was unobscured by any cloud,

and scarce a leaf of the woods beneath trembled in the air. As she

listened, the mid-night hymn of the monks rose softly from a chapel,

that stood on one of the lower cliffs, an holy strain, that seemed to

ascend through the silence of night to heaven, and her thoughts ascended

with it. From the consideration of His works, her mind arose to the

adoration of the Deity, in His goodness and power; wherever she turned

her view, whether on the sleeping earth, or to the vast regions of

space, glowing with worlds beyond the reach of human thought, the

sublimity of God, and the majesty of His presence appeared. Her eyes

were filled with tears of awful love and admiration; and she felt that

pure devotion, superior to all the distinctions of human system, which

lifts the soul above this world, and seems to expand it into a nobler

nature; such devotion as can, perhaps, only be experienced, when

the mind, rescued, for a moment, from the humbleness of earthly

considerations, aspires to contemplate His power in the sublimity of His

works, and His goodness in the infinity of His blessings.