was fain to betake herself into
some corner, lest Clifford should espy her agitation. Indeed, all the
enjoyments of this period were provocative of tears. Coming so late as
it did, it was a kind of Indian summer, with a mist in its balmiest
sunshine, and decay and death in its gaudiest delight. The more
Clifford seemed to taste the happiness of a child, the sadder was the
difference to be recognized. With a mysterious and terrible Past,
which had annihilated his memory, and a blank Future before him, he had
only this visionary and impalpable Now, which, if you once look closely
at it, is nothing. He himself, as was perceptible by many symptoms,
lay darkly behind his pleasure, and knew it to be a baby-play, which he
was to toy and trifle with, instead of thoroughly believing. Clifford
saw, it may be, in the mirror of his deeper consciousness, that he was
an example and representative of that great class of people whom an
inexplicable Providence is continually putting at cross-purposes with
the world: breaking what seems its own promise in their nature;
withholding their proper food, and setting poison before them for a
banquet; and thus--when it might so easily, as one would think, have
been adjusted otherwise--making their existence a strangeness, a
solitude, and torment. All his life long, he had been learning how to
be wretched, as one learns a foreign tongue; and now, with the lesson
thoroughly by heart, he could with difficulty comprehend his little
airy happiness. Frequently there was a dim shadow of doubt in his
eyes. "Take my hand, Phoebe," he would say, "and pinch it hard with
your little fingers! Give me a rose, that I may press its thorns, and
prove myself awake by the sharp touch of pain!" Evidently, he desired
this prick of a trifling anguish, in order to assure himself, by that
quality which he best knew to be real, that the garden, and the seven
weather-beaten gables, and Hepzibah's scowl, and Phoebe's smile, were
real likewise. Without this signet in his flesh, he could have
attributed no more substance to them than to the empty confusion of
imaginary scenes with which he had fed his spirit, until even that poor
sustenance was exhausted.

The author needs great faith in his reader's sympathy; else he must
hesitate to give details so minute, and incidents apparently so
trifling, as are essential to make up the idea of this garden-life. It
was the Eden of a thunder-smitten Adam, who had fled f