In short, she was now as mere a machine as much
wrought on, and had her motions as little at her own command
as the natural himself, who thus broke in upon her, made her
feel with a vengeance his tempestuous tenderness, and the
force of the mettle he battered with; their active loins
quivered again with the violence of their conflict, till the
surge of pleasure, foaming and raging to a height, drew down
the pearly shower that was to allay this hurricane. The
purely sensitive idiot then first shed those tears of joy that
attend its last moments, not without an agony of delight and
even almost a roar of rapture, as the gush escaped him; so
sensibly too for Louisa, that she kept him faithful company,
going off, in consent, with the old symptoms: a delicious
delirium, a tremulous convulsive shudder, and the critical
dying Oh! And now, on his getting off, she lay pleasure-
drench'd, and re-gorging its essential sweets; but quite
spent, and gasping for breath, without other sensation of
life than in those exquisite vibrations that trembled yet on
the strings of delight, which had been too intensively
touched, and which nature had been so intensly stirred with,
for the senses to be quickly at peace from.
As for the changeling, whose curious engine had been
thus successfully played off, his shift of countenance and
gesture had even something droll, or rather tragi-comic in
it: there was now an air of sad repining foolishness, super-
added to his natural one of no-meaning and idiotism, as he
stood with his label of manhood, now lank, unstiffen'd, be-
calm'd, and flapping against his thighs, down which it reach'd
half-way, terrible even in its fall, whilst under the dejec-
tion of spirit and flesh, which naturally followed, his eyes,
by turns, cast down towards his struck standard, or piteously
lifted to Louisa, seemed to require at her hands what he had
so sensibly parted from to her, and now ruefully miss'd.
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