With the sorrow and loneliness of loss within him, and Nature around him seeming to sigh for a fuller expression of the thought that throbbed within her, it is no wonder that the form of Margaret, the gathering of the thousand forms of nature into one intensity and harmony of loveliness, should rise again upon the world of his imagination, to set no more.  Father and mother were gone.  Margaret remained behind.  Nature lay around him like a shining disk, that needed a visible centre of intensest light —­ a shield of silver, that needed but a diamond boss:  Margaret alone could be that centre —­ that diamond light-giver; for she alone, of all the women he knew, seemed so to drink of the sun-rays of God, as to radiate them forth, for very fulness, upon the clouded world.

She had dawned on him like a sweet crescent moon, hanging far-off in a cold and low horizon:  now, lifting his eyes, he saw that same moon nearly at the full, and high overhead, yet leaning down towards him through the deep blue air, that overflowed with her calm triumph of light.  He knew that he loved her now.  He knew that every place he went through, caught a glimmer of romance the moment he thought of her; that every most trifling event that happened to himself, looked like a piece of a story-book the moment he thought of telling it to her.  But the growth of these feelings had been gradual —­ so slow and gradual, that when he recognized them, it seemed to him as if he had felt them from the first.  The fact was, that as soon as he began to be capable of loving Margaret, he had begun to love her.  He had never been able to understand her till he was driven into the desert.  But now that Nature revealed herself to him full of Life, yea, of the Life of Life, namely, of God himself, it was natural that he should honour and love that ‘lady of her own’; that he should recognize Margaret as greater than himself, as nearer to the heart of Nature —­ yea, of God the father of all.  She had been one with Nature from childhood, and when he began to be one with nature too, he must become one with her.

And now, in absence, he began to study the character of her whom, in presence, he had thought he knew perfectly.  He soon found that it was a Manoa, a golden city in a land of Paradise —­ too good to be believed in, except by him who was blessed with the beholding of it.  He knew now that she had always understood what he was only just waking to recognize.  And he felt that the scholar had been very patient with the stupidity of the master, and had drawn from his lessons a nourishment of which he had known nothing himself.

But dared he think of marrying her, a creature inspired with a presence of the Spirit of God which none but the saints enjoy, and thence clothed with a garment of beauty, which her spirit wove out of its own loveliness?  She was a being to glorify any man merely by granting him her habitual presence:  what, then, if she gave her love!  She would bring with her the presence of God himself, for she walked ever in his light, and that light clung to her and radiated from her.  True, many young maidens must be walking in the sunshine of God, else whence the light and loveliness and bloom, the smile and the laugh of their youth?  But Margaret not only walked in this light:  she knew it and whence it came.  She looked up to its source, and it illuminated her face.