judge. She painted in oils;--I had never before
seen any one use the brush, and days would not have been too
long for me to watch the pictures growing beneath her hand.
She played the harp; and its tones are still to me the heralds
of the promised land I saw before me then. She rose, she
looked, she spoke; and the gentle swaying motion she made
all through life has gladdened memory, as the stream does the
woods and meadows.

'As she was often at the house of one of our neighbors, and
afterwards at our own, my thoughts were fixed on her with all
the force of my nature. It was my first real interest in my
kind, and it engrossed me wholly. I had seen her,--I should
see her,--and my mind lay steeped in the visions that flowed
from this source. My task-work I went through with, as I have
done on similar occasions all my life, aided by pride that
could not bear to fail, or be questioned. Could I cease from
doing the work of the day, and hear the reason sneeringly
given,--"Her head is so completely taken up with ---- that
she can do nothing"? Impossible.

'Should the first love be blighted, they say, the mind loses
its sense of eternity. All forms of existence seem fragile,
the prison of time real, for a god is dead. Equally true is
this of friendship. I thank Heaven that this first feeling was
permitted its free flow. The years that lay between the woman
and the girl only brought her beauty into perspective, and
enabled me to see her as I did the mountains from my window,
and made her presence to me a gate of Paradise. That which
she was, that which she brought, that which she might have
brought, were mine, and over a whole region of new life I
ruled proprietor of the soil in my own right.

'Her mind was sufficiently unoccupied to delight in my warm
devotion. She could not know what it was to me, but the light
cast by the flame through so delicate a vase cheered and
charmed her. All who saw admired her in their way; but she
would lightly turn her head from their hard or oppressive
looks, and fix a glance of full-eyed sweetness on the child,
who, from a distance, watched all her looks and motions. She
did not say much to me--not much to any one; she spoke in her
whole being rather than by chosen words. Indeed, her proper
speech was dance or song, and what was less exp