it into words,--only into feelings; and
these I have attempted to shadow by showing that her face hinted that
revelation of something we are close to knowing, which all imaginative
persons are looking for either in this world or on the very threshold of
the next.

You shake your head at the vagueness and fanciful incomprehensibleness
of my description of the expression in a young girl's face. You forget
what a miserable surface-matter this language is in which we try to
reproduce our interior state of being. Articulation is a shallow trick.
From the light Poh! which we toss off from our lips as we fling a
nameless scribbler's impertinence into our waste-baskets, to the gravest
utterances which comes from our throats in our moments of deepest need,
is only a space of some three or four inches. Words, which are a set of
clickings, hissings, lispings, and so on, mean very little, compared to
tones and expression of the features. I give it up; I thought I could
shadow forth in some feeble way, by their aid, the effect this young
girl's face produces on my imagination; but it is of no use. No doubt
your head aches, trying to make something of my description. If there
is here and there one that can make anything intelligible out of my talk
about the Great Secret, and who has spelt out a syllable or two of it on
some woman's face, dead or living, that is all I can expect. One should
see the person with whom he converses about such matters. There
are dreamy-eyed people to whom I should say all these things with a
certainty of being understood;--

That moment that his face I see,
I know the man that must hear me
To him my tale I teach.

--I am afraid some of them have not got a spare quarter of a dollar for
this August number, so that they will never see it.

--Let us start again, just as if we had not made this ambitious attempt,
which may go for nothing, and you can have your money refunded, if you
will make the change.

This young girl, about whom I have talked so unintelligibly, is the
unconscious centre of attraction to the whole solar system of our
breakfast-table. The Little Gentleman leans towards her, and she again
seems to be swayed as by some invisible gentle force towards him. That
slight inclination of two persons with a strong affinity towards each
other, throwing them a little out of plumb when they sit side by side,
is a physical fact I have often noticed. Then there is a tend