she was a new apparition foreign to that scene, if not to me.  Her dress,—­the arrangement of her hair, which had the graceful pliancy of races highly cultivated for long,—­the intelligent and full picture of her eye, whose reserve was in its self-possession, not in timidity,—­all combined to make up a whole impression, which, though too young to understand, I was well prepared to feel.

’How wearisome now appears that thorough-bred millefleur beauty, the distilled result of ages of European culture!  Give me rather the wild heath on the lonely hill-side, than such a rose-tree from the daintily clipped garden.  But, then, I had but tasted the cup, and knew not how little it could satisfy; more, more, was all my cry; continued through years, till I had been at the very fountain.  Indeed, it was a ruby-red, a perfumed draught, and I need not abuse the wine because I prefer water, but merely say I have had enough of it.  Then, the first sight, the first knowledge of such a person was intoxication.

’She was an English lady, who, by a singular chance, was cast upon this region for a few months.  Elegant and captivating, her every look and gesture was tuned to a different pitch from anything I had ever known.  She was in various ways “accomplished,” as it is called, though to what degree I cannot now judge.  She painted in oils;—­I had never before seen any one use the brush, and days would not have been too long for me to watch the pictures growing beneath her hand.  She played the harp; and its tones are still to me the heralds of the promised land I saw before me then.  She rose, she looked, she spoke; and the gentle swaying motion she made all through life has gladdened memory, as the stream does the woods and meadows.

’As she was often at the house of one of our neighbors, and afterwards at our own, my thoughts were fixed on her with all the force of my nature.  It was my first real interest in my kind, and it engrossed me wholly.  I had seen her,—­I should see her,—­and my mind lay steeped in the visions that flowed from this source.  My task-work I went through with, as I have done on similar occasions all my life, aided by pride that could not bear to fail, or be questioned.  Could I cease from doing the work of the day, and hear the reason sneeringly given,—­“Her head is so completely taken up with ——­ that she can do nothing”?  Impossible.

’Should the first love be blighted, they say, the mind loses its sense of eternity.  All forms of existence seem fragile, the prison of time real, for a god is dead.  Equally true is this of friendship.  I thank Heaven that this first feeling was permitted its free flow.  The years that lay between the woman and the girl only brought her beauty into perspective, and enabled me to see her as I did the mountains from my window, and made her presence to me a gate of Paradise.  That which she was, that which she brought, that