ched the grace, the ardor,
the glory of devotion. Through those strange spectacles how often I
saw the noblest heart renouncing all other hope, all other ambition,
all other life, than the possible love of some one of those statues.
Ah! me, it was terrible, but they had not the love to give. The Parian
face was so polished and smooth, because there was no sorrow upon the
heart,--and, drearily often, no heart to be touched. I could not
wonder that the noble heart of devotion was broken, for it had dashed
itself against a stone. I wept, until my spectacles were dimmed for
that hopeless sorrow; but there was a pang beyond tears for those icy
statues.

"Still a boy, I was thus too much a man in knowledge,--I did not
comprehend the sights I was compelled to see. I used to tear my
glasses away from my eyes, and, frightened at myself, run to escape my
own consciousness. Reaching the small house where we then lived, I
plunged into my grandmother's room and, throwing myself upon the
floor, buried my face in her lap; and sobbed myself to sleep with
premature grief. But when I awakened, and felt her cool hand upon my
hot forehead, and heard the low, sweet song, or the gentle story, or
the tenderly told parable from the Bible, with which she tried to
soothe me, I could not resist the mystic fascination that lured me, as
I lay in her lap, to steal a glance at her through the spectacles.

"Pictures of the Madonna have not her rare and pensive beauty. Upon
the tranquil little islands her life had been eventless, and all the
fine possibilities of her nature were like flowers that never bloomed.
Placid were all her years; yet I have read of no heroine, of no woman
great in sudden crises, that it did not seem to me she might have
been. The wife and widow of a man who loved his own home better than
the homes of others, I have yet heard of no queen, no belle, no
imperial beauty, whom in grace, and brilliancy, and persuasive
courtesy, she might not have surpassed.

"Madam," said Titbottom to my wife, whose heart hung upon his story;
"your husband's young friend, Aurelia, wears sometimes a camelia in
her hair, and no diamond in the ball-room seems so costly as that
perfect flower, which women envy, and for whose least and withered
petal men sigh; yet, in the tropical solitudes of Brazil, how many a
camelia bud drops from a bush that no eye has ever seen, which, had it
flowered and been noticed, would have gilded all hearts with its
memor