“Pictures of the Madonna have not her rare and pensive beauty.  Upon the tranquil little islands her life had been eventless, and all the fine possibilities of her nature were like flowers that never bloomed.  Placid were all her years; yet I have read of no heroine, of no woman great in sudden crises, that it did not seem to me she might have been.  The wife and widow of a man who loved his own home better than the homes of others, I have yet heard of no queen, no belle, no imperial beauty, whom in grace, and brilliancy, and persuasive courtesy, she might not have surpassed.

“Madam,” said Titbottom to my wife, whose heart hung upon his story; “your husband’s young friend, Aurelia, wears sometimes a camelia in her hair, and no diamond in the ball-room seems so costly as that perfect flower, which women envy, and for whose least and withered petal men sigh; yet, in the tropical solitudes of Brazil, how many a camelia bud drops from a bush that no eye has ever seen, which, had it flowered and been noticed, would have gilded all hearts with its memory.

“When I stole these furtive glances at my grandmother, half fearing that they were wrong, I saw only a calm lake, whose shores were low, and over which the sky hung unbroken, so that the least star was clearly reflected.  It had an atmosphere of solemn twilight tranquillity, and so completely did its unruffled surface blend with the cloudless, star-studded sky, that, when I looked through my spectacles at my grandmother, the vision seemed to me all heaven and stars.  Yet, as I gazed and gazed, I felt what stately cities might well have been built upon those shores, and have flashed prosperity over the calm, like coruscations of pearls.

“I dreamed of gorgeous fleets, silken sailed and blown by perfumed winds, drifting over those depthless waters and through those spacious skies.  I gazed upon the twilight, the inscrutable silence, like a God-fearing discoverer upon a new, and vast, and dim sea, bursting upon him through forest glooms, and in the fervor of whose impassioned gaze, a millennial and poetic world arises, and man need no longer die to be happy.

“My companions naturally deserted me, for I had grown wearily grave and abstracted:  and, unable to resist the allurement of my spectacles, I was constantly lost in a world, of which those companions were part, yet of which they knew nothing.  I grew cold and hard, almost morose; people seemed to me blind and unreasonable.  They did the wrong thing.  They called green, yellow; and black, white.  Young men said of a girl, ‘What a lovely, simple creature!’ I looked, and there was only a glistening wisp of straw, dry and hollow.  Or they said, ’What a cold, proud beauty!’ I looked, and lo! a Madonna, whose heart held the world.  Or they said, ‘What a wild, giddy girl!’ and I saw a glancing, dancing mountain stream, pure as the virgin snows whence it flowed, singing through sun and shade, over pearls and gold dust, slipping along unstained by weed, or rain, or heavy foot of cattle, touching the flowers with a dewy kiss,—­a beam of grace, a happy song, a line of light, in the dim and troubled landscape.