She looked
up, with all these inward agitations painted on her cheeks. His
beaming eyes were full of patriotic ardor; and his fine countenance,
composed into a heavenly calmness by the sublime sentiments which
occupied his soul, made him appear to her not a as man, but as an angel
from the armed host of heaven.
"Fear not, lady," said the hermit, "that you would plunge your
deliverer into any extraordinary danger by involving him in what you
might call rebellion against the usurper. He is already a proscribed
man."
"Proscribed!" repeated she; "wretched indeed is my country when her
noblest spirits are denied the right to live!-when every step they take
to regain what has been torn from them, only involves them in deeper
ruin!"
"No country is wretched, sweet lady," returned the knight, "till, by a
dastardly acquiescence, it consents to its own slavery. Bonds, and
death, are the utmost of our enemy's malice; the one is beyond his
power to inflict, when a man is determined to die or to live free; and
for the other, which of us will think that ruin, which leads to the
blessed freedom of paradise?"
Helen looked on the chief as she used to look on her cousin, when
expressions of virtuous enthusiasm burst from his lips; but now it was
rather with the gaze of admiring awe than the exhultation of one
youthful mind sympathizing with another.
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