hat
certifies delicate perception or fine judgment, with every
unostentatious word or smile that shows a heart awake to others; and no
sweep of garment or turn of figure is more satisfying than that which
enters as a restoration of confidence that one person is present on
whom no intention will be lost. What dignity of meaning goes on
gathering in frowns and laughs which are never observed in the wrong
place; what suffused adorableness in a human frame where there is a
mind that can flash out comprehension and hands that can execute
finely! The more obvious beauty, also adorable sometimes--one may say
it without blasphemy--begins by being an apology for folly, and ends
like other apologies in becoming tiresome by iteration; and that
Klesmer, though very susceptible to it, should have a passionate
attachment to Miss Arrowpoint, was no more a paradox than any other
triumph of a manifold sympathy over a monotonous attraction. We object
less to be taxed with the enslaving excess of our passions than with
our deficiency in wider passion; but if the truth were known, our
reputed intensity is often the dullness of not knowing what else to do
with ourselves. Tannhaeuser, one suspects, was a knight of ill-furnished
imagination, hardly of larger discourse than a heavy Guardsman; Merlin
had certainly seen his best days, and was merely repeating himself,
when he fell into that hopeless captivity; and we know that Ulysses
felt so manifest an _ennui_ under similar circumstances that Calypso
herself furthered his departure. There is indeed a report that he
afterward left Penelope; but since she was habitually absorbed in
worsted work, and it was probably from her that Telemachus got his
mean, pettifogging disposition, always anxious about the property and
the daily consumption of meat, no inference can be drawn from this
already dubious scandal as to the relation between companionship and
constancy.

Klesmer was as versatile and fascinating as a young Ulysses on a
sufficient acquaintance--one whom nature seemed to have first made
generously and then to have added music as a dominant power using all
the abundant rest, and, as in Mendelssohn, finding expression for
itself not only in the highest finish of execution, but in that fervor
of creative work and theoretic belief which pierces devoted purpose.
His foibles of arrogance and vanity did not exceed such as may be found
in the best English families; and Catherine Arrowpoint had no