emained
impressed with the conviction that he was speaking from the
large experiences of deep, mysterious wisdom and knowledge,
and sat listening with a reverential awe, as to some strange,
lofty strain, coming to her from some higher and nobler region
than she could hope to attain to as yet, and of which she
could in some sort catch the spirit, though she could not
enter into the idea. At the same time there was a certain
childlike vein running through all the old man's rambling
talk, which made it, after all, not unsuited to meet the
instinctive aspirations of a child's mind. With him love and
veneration for greatness and beauty, in every form, amounted
almost to a passion, which was still fresh and genuine, as in
the lad to whom the realization of the word _blase_ seems the
one incomprehensible impossibility of life. In the simple
reverence with which he spoke of the great masters of his art,
Madelon might have recognized the same spirit as that which
animated the American; and as the artist had once uncovered at
the name of Raffaelle and Lionardo da Vinci, so did the
musician figuratively bow down at the shrines of Handel, or
Bach, or Beethoven. From both these men, so different in other
respects, the child began to learn the same lesson, which in
all her life before she had never even heard hinted at.

All this, however, almost overtaxed our little Madelon's
faculties, and it was not surprising that, as the winter wore
on, a change gradually came over her. In truth, both intellect
and imagination were being overstrained by the constant
succession of new images, new ideas, new thoughts, that
presented themselves to her. She by no means grew accustomed
to churches--not in the sense, at any rate, which her father
had hoped would be the result of his new system. It was not
possible that she should, while so much remained that was
mysterious and unexplained; she only wearied her small brain
with the effort to find the explanation for all these new
perplexities, which she felt must exist somewhere, though she
could not find it; add to this, these long conversations, this
music, with its strange, vague suggestions, and even the
thousand novelties of the picturesque Italian life around her,
not one of which was lost on her impressionable little mind,
and we need not wonder that she began to suffer from an
excitement that gathered in strength from day to day. She grew
thin, morbid, nervous, ate almost nothing, and lost