 for his praises of her charms, and his equivocal replies, in respect to his designs towards her, gave to him, her most undisguised thoughts, and her whole enraptured heart.
This, to her apparently harmless, intercourse had not lasted many weeks before

she loved him—she even confessed she did, every time that any unwonted mark of attention from him, struck with unexpected force her infatuated senses.
It has been said by a celebrated writer, upon the affection subsisting between the two sexes, "that there are many persons who, if they had never heard of the passion of love, would never have felt it." Might it not with equal truth be added, that—there are many more, who having heard of it, and believing most firmly that they feel it, are nevertheless mistaken? Neither of these cases was the lot of Hannah. She experienced the sentiment before she ever heard it named in that sense in which she felt it—and she felt it as genuine love alone exists—joined with numerous other sentiments: for love, however rated by many, as the chief passion of the human heart, is but a poor dependant, a retainer upon other passions; admiration, gratitude, respect, esteem, pride in the object—divest the boasted sensation of these, and it is no more than the impression of a twelve-month, by courtesy, or vulgar error, termed love.

Hannah was formed by the rarest structure of the human frame, and fated by the tenderest thrillings of the human soul, to inspire and to experience real love—but her nice taste, her delicate thoughts, were so refined beyond the sphere of her own station in society, that nature would have produced this prodigy of attraction in vain, had not one of superior education and manners assailed her heart: and had she been accustomed to the conversation of men in William's rank of life, she had, perhaps, treated William's addresses with indifference; but in comparing him with her familiar acquaintance, he was a miracle! His unremitted attention seemed the condescension of a superior being, to whom she looked up with reverence, with admiration, with awe, with pride, with sense of obligation—and all those various passions which constitute true, and never to be eradicated, love.
But in vain she felt and even avowed with her lips what every look, every gesture, had long denoted; William, with discontent, sometimes with anger, upbraided

her for her false professions, and vowed "That while one tender proof, which he fervently besought, was wanting, she did but aggravate his misery by lesser endearments."
Hannah
