I was really sleeping—­at least I could not stir myself.  I saw you sitting at my bedside for a long time, your eyes steadfastly fixed upon me, and I felt your glances playing upon my face like sunbeams.  At last your eyes grew weary, and I perceived the great tears falling from them.  You held your face in your hands, and loudly sobbed:  Marie, Marie!  Ah, my dear Hofrath, our young friend has never done that, and yet you have sent him away.’  As I thus talked with him, half in jest and half in earnest, as I always speak, I perceived that I had hurt the old man’s feelings.  He became perfectly silent, and blushed like a child.  Then I took the volume of Wordsworth’s poems which I had been reading, and said:  ’Here is another old man whom I love, and love with my whole heart, who understands me, and whom I understand, and yet I have never seen him, and shall never see him on earth, since it is so to be.  Now I will read you one of his poems, that you may see how one can love, and that love is a silent benediction which the lover lays upon the head of the beloved, and then goes on his way in rapturous sorrow.’  Then I read to him Wordsworth’s ‘Highland Girl;’ and now, my friend, place the lamp nearer, and read the poem to me, for it refreshes me every time I hear it.  A spirit breathes through it like the silent, everlasting evening-red, which stretches its arms in love and blessing over the pure breast of the snow-covered mountains.”

As her words thus gradually and peacefully filled my soul, it at last grew still and solemn in my breast again; the storm was over, and her image floated like the silvery moonlight upon the gently rippling waves of my love—­this world-sea which rolls through the hearts of all men, and which each calls his own while it is an all-animating pulse-beat of the whole human race.  I would most gladly have kept silent like Nature as it lay before our view without, and ever grew stiller and darker:  But she gave me the book, and I read: 

  Sweet Highland Girl, a very shower
  Of beauty is thy earthly dower! 
  Twice seven consenting years have shed
  Their utmost bounty on thy head: 
  And these gray rocks, that household lawn,
  Those trees, a veil just half withdrawn,
  This fall of water that doth make
  A murmur near the silent lake,
  This little bay; a quiet road
  That holds in shelter thy abode—­
  In truth, together do ye seem
  Like something fashioned in a dream;
  Such forms as from their covert peep
  When earthly cares are laid asleep! 
  But, O fair creature! in the light
  Of common day, so heavenly bright,
  I bless thee, vision as thou art,
  I bless thee with a human heart;
  God shield thee to thy latest years! 
  Thee neither know I, nor thy peers;
  And yet my eyes are filled with tears.