firm, bold hand, in distinction from that imperfect mental vision and uncertain touch which give us the feeble pictures and the lumpy statues of the mere artisans on canvas or in stone.  A true artist, therefore, can hardly fail to have a sharp, well-defined character.  Besides this, many young girls have a strange audacity blended with their instinctive delicacy.  Even in physical daring many of them are a match for boys; whereas you will find few among mature women, and especially if they are mothers, who do not confess, and not unfrequently proclaim, their timidity.  One of these young girls, as many of us hereabouts remember, climbed to the top of a jagged, slippery rock lying out in the waves,—­an ugly height to get up, and a worse one to get down, even for a bold young fellow of sixteen.  Another was in the way of climbing tall trees for crows’ nests,—­and crows generally know about how far boys can “shin up,” and set their household establishments above high-water-mark.  Still another of these young ladies I saw for the first time in an open boat, tossing on the ocean ground-swell, a mile or two from shore, off a lonely island.  She lost all her daring, after she had some girls of her own to look out for.

Many blondes are very gentle, yielding in character, impressible, unelastic.  But the positive blondes, with the golden tint running through them, are often full of character.  They come from those deep-bosomed German women that Tacitus portrayed in such strong colors.  The negative blondes, or those women whose tints have faded out as their line of descent has become impoverished, are of various blood, and in them the soul has often become pale with that blanching of the hair and loss of color in the eyes which makes them approach the character of Albinesses.

I see in this young girl that union of strength and sensibility which, when directed and impelled by the strong instinct so apt to accompany this combination of active and passive capacity, we call genius.  She is not an accomplished artist, certainly, as yet; but there is always an air in every careless figure she draws, as it were of upward aspiration,—­the elan of John of Bologna’s Mercury,—­a lift to them, as if they had on winged sandals, like the herald of the gods.  I hear her singing sometimes; and though she evidently is not trained, yet is there a wild sweetness in her fitful and sometimes fantastic melodies,—­such as can come only from the inspiration of the moment,—­strangely enough, reminding me of those long passages I have heard from my little neighbor’s room, yet of different tone, and by no means to be mistaken for those weird harmonies.