Yet Mary was not so much absorbed and satisfied with the visible and practical as had once been the case.  The growth had not been all on Louis’s side.  If her steadfast spirit had strengthened his wavering resolution, the intercourse and sympathy with him had opened and unfolded many a perception and quality in her, which had been as tightly and hardly cased up as leaf-buds in their gummy envelopes.  A wider range had been given to her thoughts; there was a swelling of heart, a vividness of sensation, such as she had not known in earlier times; she had been taught the mystery of creation, the strange connexion with the Unseen, and even with her fellow-men.  Beyond the ordinary practical kind offices, for which she had been always ready, there was now mingled something of Louis’s more comprehensive spirit of questioning what would do them good, and drawing food for reflection from their diverse ways.

She was sensible of the change again and again, when sights recurred which once had only spoken to her eye.  That luminous sea, sparkling like floods of stars, had been little more than ’How pretty! how funny!’ at her first voyage.  Now, it was not only ’How Louis would admire it!’ but ’How profusely, how gloriously has the Creator spread the globe with mysterious beauty! how marvellously has He caused His creatures to hold forth this light, to attract others to their needful food!’ And the furrow of fire left by their vessel’s wake spoke to her of that path ’like a shining light, shining more and more unto the perfect day.’  If with it came the remembrance of his vision of the threads of light, it was not a recollection which would lead to repining.

And when at Cape Horn, a mighty ice mountain drifted within view, spired, pinnacled, encrusted with whiteness, rivalled only by the glory of the summer cloud, caverned here and there into hollows of sapphire blue, too deeply dazzling to behold, or rising into peaks of clear, hard, chill green; the wild fantastic points sometimes glimmering with fragments of the rainbow arch; the rich variety, endless beyond measure in form and colouring, and not only magnificent and terrible in the whole maas, but lovely beyond imagination in each crystal too minute for the eye.  Mary had once, on a like occasion, only said, ‘it was very cold;’ and looked to see whether the captain expected the monster to bear down on the ship.  But the present iceberg put her in mind of the sublime aspirations which gothic cathedrals seem as if they would fain embody.  And then, she thought of the marvellous interminable waste of beauty of those untrodden regions, whence yonder enormous iceberg was but a small fragment—­a petty messenger—­regions unseen by human eye—­beauty untouched by human hand-the glory, the sameness, yet the infinite variety of perfect purity.  Did it not seem, with all the associations of cold, of peril, of dreariness, to be a visible token that indeed He who fashioned it could prepare ’good things past man’s understanding!’