ure.

And there was one who, child as she was, watched the coming of that
young and beautiful stranger with emotion beyond her years. Brought up
alone; mixing, since her mother's death, with no companions of her
age; catching dim and solemn glimpses of her father's wild but lofty
speculations; his books, filled with strange characters and imposing
"words of mighty sound," open for ever to her young and curious gaze;
it can scarce be matter of wonder that something strange and unworldly
mingled with the elements of character which Lucilla Volktman early
developed--a character that was nature itself, yet of a nature erratic
and bizarre. Her impulses she obeyed spontaneously, but none fathomed
their origin. She was not of a quiet and meek order of mind; but
passionate, changeful, and restless. She would laugh and weep without
apparent cause; and the colour on her cheek never seemed for two
minutes the same; and the most fitful changes of an April heaven were
immutability itself compared with the play and lustre of expression that
undulated in her features and her wild, deep, eloquent eyes.

Her person resembled her mind; it was beautiful; but the beauty struck
you less than the singularity of its character. Her eyes were of a
darkness that at night seemed black; but her hair was of the brightest
and purest auburn; her complexion, sometimes pale, sometimes radiant
even to the flush of a fever, was delicate and clear; her teeth and
mouth were lovely beyond all words; her hands and feet were small to
a fault; and as she grew up (for we have forestalled her age in this
description) her shape, though wanting in height, was in such harmony
and proportion, that the mind of the sculptor would sometimes escape
from the absorption of the astrologer and Volktman would gaze upon her
with the same admiration that he would have bestowed, in spite of the
subject, on the goddess-forms of Phidias or Canova. But then, this
beauty was accompanied with such endless variety of gesture, often so
wild, though always necessarily graceful, that the eye ached for that
repose requisite for prolonged admiration.

When she was spoken to, she did not often answer to the purpose, but
rather appeared to reply as to some interrogatory of her own; in the
midst of one occupation, she would start up to another; leave that, in
turn, undone, and sit down in silence lasting for hours. Her voice, in
singing, was exquisitely melodious; she had too, an intuitive