and utterance, Polwarth warded, to avoid the least danger of her discovery; how often fear for her shook the delicate frame of Ruth; how often her host left some book unbought, that he might procure instead some thing to tempt her to eat; how often her hostess turned faint in cooking for her.  The crooked creatures pitied, as well they might, the lovely lady; they believed that Christ was in her; that the deepest in her was the nature He had made—­His own, and not that which she had gathered to herself—­and thought her own.  For the sake of the Christ hidden in her, her own deepest, best, purest self; that she might be lifted from the dust-heap of the life she had for herself ruined, into the clear air of a pure will and the Divine Presence, they counted their best labor most fitly spent.  It is the human we love in each other—­and the human is the Christ.  What we do not love is the devilish—­no more the human than the morrow’s wormy mass was the manna of God.  To be for the Christ in a man, is the highest love you can give him; for in the unfolding alone of that Christ can the individuality, the genuine peculiarity of the man, the man himself, be perfected—­the flower of his nature be developed, in its own distinct loveliness, beauty, splendor, and brought to its idea.

The main channel through which the influences of the gnomes reached the princess, was their absolute simplicity.  They spoke and acted what was in them.  Through this open utterance, their daily, common righteousness revealed itself—­their gentleness, their love of all things living, their care of each other, their acceptance as the will of God concerning them of whatever came, their general satisfaction with things as they were—­though it must in regard to some of them have been in the hope that they would soon pass away, for one of the things Juliet least could fail to observe was their suffering patience.  They always spoke as if they felt where their words were going—­as if they were hearing them arrive—­as if the mind they addressed were a bright silver table on which they must not set down even the cup of the water of life roughly:  it must make no scratch, no jar, no sound beyond a faint sweet salutation.  Pain had taught them not sensitiveness but delicacy.  A hundred are sensitive for one that is delicate.  Sensitiveness is a miserable, a cheap thing in itself, but invaluable if it be used for the nurture of delicacy.  They refused to receive offense, their care was to give none.  The burning spot in the center of that distorted spine, which ought to have lifted Ruth up to a lovely woman, but had failed and sunk, and ever after ached bitterly as if with defeat, had made her pitiful over the pains of humanity:  she could bear it, for there was something in her deeper than pain; but alas for those who were not thus upheld!  Her agony drove her to pray for the whole human race, exposed to like passion with her.  The asthmatic choking which so often made Polwarth’s nights a long misery, taught him sympathy with all prisoners and captives, chiefly with those bound in the bonds of an evil conscience:  to such he held himself specially devoted.  They thought little of bearing pain:  to know they had caused it would have been torture.  Each, graciously uncomplaining, was tender over the ailing of the other.