“The sweetest flower in my garden,” said the minister, “should perfume no stranger’s vase, however, nor dangle at a knave’s button-hole.”

“Because you would watch it and care for it, water and train it, and make it doubly your own.  But if you did neither?”

“I should deserve my fate,” said he, sorrowfully.

XIV.

The first letter we received from Mrs. Lewis was from the North of Scotland, where the party of three, increased to one much larger, were making the tour of the Hebrides.  I cannot say much for either the penmanship or the orthography of the letter, which was incorrect as usual; but the abundant beauty of her descriptions, and the fine sense she seemed to have of lofty and wild scenery, made her journey a living picture.  All her keen sense of external life was brought into activity, and she projected on the paper before her groups of people, or groups of mountains, with a vividness that showed she had only to transfer them from the retina:  they had no need of any additional processes.  She made no remarks on society, or inferences from what she saw in the present to what had been in the past or might be in the future.  It was simply a power of representation, unequalled in its way, and yet more remarkable to us for what it failed of doing than for what it did.

We could not but perceive two things.  One, that she never spoke of home-ties, or children, or husband:  not an allusion to either.  The other, that every hill and every vale, the mounting mist and the resting shadow, all that gave life and beauty to her every-day pursuits, which seemed, indeed, all pictorial,—­all these were informed and permeated, as it were, with one influence,—­that of Remington.  An uncomfortable sense of this made me say, as I finished the letter,—­

“I am sorry for the poor bird!”

“So am I,” answered the minister, with a clouded brow; “and the more, as I think I see the bird is limed.”

“How?” I said, with a sort of horrified retreat from the expressed thought, though the thought itself haunted me.

My husband seemed thinking the matter over, as if to clear it in his own mind before he spoke again.

“I suppose there is a moral disease, which, through its connection with a newly awakened and brilliant intellect, does not enervate the whole character.  I mean that this connection of moral weakness with the intellect gives a fatal strength to the character,—­do you take me?”

“Yes, I think so,” said I.

“She is lofty, self-poised,—­confident in what never yet supported any one.  Pride of character does not keep us from falling.  Humility would help us in that way.  Unfortunately, that, too, is often bought dearly.  I mean that this virtue of humbleness, which makes us tender of others and afraid for ourselves, is at the expense of sorrowful and humiliating experience.”