so eagerly again? He recognized the
handwriting,--those fair, clear characters, so peculiar in their
woman-like delicacy and grace, the same as in the wild, pathetic poems,
the sight of which had made an era in his boyhood. From these pages the
image of the mysterious Nora rose once more before him. He felt that he
was with a mother. He went back, and closed the door gently, as if with
a jealous piety, to exclude each ruder shadow from the world of spirits,
and be alone with that mournful ghost. For a thought written in warm,
sunny life, and then suddenly rising up to us, when the hand that traced
and the heart that cherished it are dust, is verily as a ghost. It is a
likeness struck off of the fond human being, and surviving it. Far more
truthful than bust or portrait, it bids us see the tear flow, and the
pulse beat. What ghost can the churchyard yield to us like the writing
of the dead?

The bulk of the papers had been once lightly sewn to each other; they
had come undone, perhaps in Burley's rude hands, but their order
was easily apparent. Leonard soon saw that they formed a kind of
journal,--not, indeed, a regular diary, nor always relating to the
things of the day. There were gaps in time--no attempt at successive
narrative; sometimes, instead of prose, a hasty burst of verse, gushing
evidently from the heart; sometimes all narrative was left untold,
and yet, as it were, epitomized by a single burning line--a single
exclamation--of woe or joy! Everywhere you saw records of a nature
exquisitely susceptible; and, where genius appeared, it was so artless,
that you did not call it genius, but emotion. At the onset the writer
did not speak of herself in the first person. The manuscript opened with
descriptions and short dialogues, carried on by persons to whose names
only initial letters were assigned, all written in a style of simple
innocent freshness, and breathing of purity and happiness, like a dawn
of spring. Two young persons, humbly born, a youth and a girl, the last
still in childhood, each chiefly self-taught, are wandering on Sabbath
evenings among green dewy fields, near the busy town, in which labour
awhile is still. Few words pass between them. You see at once, though
the writer does not mean to convey it, how far beyond the scope of her
male companion flies the heavenward imagination of the girl. It is he
who questions, it is she who answers; and soon there steals upon you,
as you read, the conviction t