thy race; why, thou has sought converts and pupils; why, in seeing life after life voluntarily dropping from our starry order, thou still aspirest to renew the vanished, and repair the lost; why, amidst thy calculations, restless and unceasing as the wheels of Nature herself, thou recoilest from the thought to be alone!  So with myself; at last I, too, seek a convert, an equal,—­I, too, shudder to be alone!  What thou hast warned me of has come to pass.  Love reduces all things to itself.  Either must I be drawn down to the nature of the beloved, or hers must be lifted to my own.  As whatever belongs to true Art has always necessarily had attraction for us, whose very being is in the ideal whence Art descends, so in this fair creature I have learned, at last, the secret that bound me to her at the first glance.  The daughter of music,—­music, passing into her being, became poetry.  It was not the stage that attracted her, with its hollow falsehoods; it was the land in her own fancy which the stage seemed to centre and represent.  There the poetry found a voice,—­there it struggled into imperfect shape; and then (that land insufficient for it) it fell back upon itself.  It coloured her thoughts, it suffused her soul; it asked not words, it created not things; it gave birth but to emotions, and lavished itself on dreams.  At last came love; and there, as a river into the sea, it poured its restless waves, to become mute and deep and still,—­the everlasting mirror of the heavens.

And is it not through this poetry which lies within her that she may be led into the large poetry of the universe!  Often I listen to her careless talk, and find oracles in its unconscious beauty, as we find strange virtues in some lonely flower.  I see her mind ripening under my eyes; and in its fair fertility what ever-teeming novelties of thought!  O Mejnour! how many of our tribe have unravelled the laws of the universe,—­have solved the riddles of the exterior nature, and deduced the light from darkness!  And is not the poet, who studies nothing but the human heart, a greater philosopher than all?  Knowledge and atheism are incompatible.  To know Nature is to know that there must be a God.  But does it require this to examine the method and architecture of creation?  Methinks, when I look upon a pure mind, however ignorant and childlike, that I see the August and Immaterial One more clearly than in all the orbs of matter which career at His bidding through space.

Rightly is it the fundamental decree of our order, that we must impart our secrets only to the pure.  The most terrible part of the ordeal is in the temptations that our power affords to the criminal.  If it were possible that a malevolent being could attain to our faculties, what disorder it might introduce into the globe!  Happy that it is not possible; the malevolence would disarm the power.  It is in the purity of Viola that I rely, as thou more vainly