She is but a form and presence in which the joy, not merely of the fair sunset scene, but primarily and emphatically of the human hearts around her, enshrines itself.  It has no free life in herself apart from others; it must inevitably die if shut out from this tremulousness of human sympathy.  And we know it shall give place to a sorrow correspondingly sensitive, intense, and absorbing, whenever the young bright spirit is brought face to face with human sorrow.  Even while we gaze on her as the embodied joy, and love, and triumph of the scene, the shadow begins to fall.  The band of Gypsy prisoners passes by, and her eyes meet those eyes whose gaze, not to be so read by any nature lower and more superficial than hers—­

            “Seemed to say he bore
   The pain of those who never could be saved.”

Joy collapses at once within her; the light fades away from the scene; the very sunset glory becomes dull and cold.  We are shown from the first that no life can satisfy this “child of light” which shall not be a life in the fullest and deepest unison to which circumstances shall call her with the life of humanity.  That true greatness of our humanity is already active within her, which makes it impossible she should live or die to herself alone.  Her destiny is already marked out by a force of which circumstance may determine the special manifestation, but which no force of circumstance can turn aside from its course; the force of a living spiritual power within herself which constrains that she shall be faithful to the highest good which life shall place before her.

We would fain linger for a little over the scenes which follow between her and Don Silva; portraying as they do a love so intense in its virgin tenderness, and so spiritually pure and high.  It is the same “child of light” that comes before us here; the same tremulous living in the light and joy of her love, but also the same impossibility of living even in its light and joy apart from those of her beloved.  And not from his only:  that passion which in more ordinary natures so almost inevitably contracts the sphere of the sympathies, in Fedalma expands and enlarges it.  Amid all the intoxicating sweetness of her bright young joys, the loving heart turns again and again to the thought of human sorrow and wrong; and among all the hopes that gladden her future, one is never absent from her thoughts—­“Oh!  I shall have much power as well as joy;” power to redress the wrong and to assuage the suffering.  Half playfully, half seriously, she asks the question—­

   “But is it what we love, or how we love,
   That makes true good?”