elestial Monta Rosa, in prospect. It was there that Diana reawakened,
after the trance of a deadly draught, to the glory of the earth and her
share in it. She wakened like the Princess of the Kiss; happily not to
kisses; to no sign, touch or call that she could trace backward. The
change befell her without a warning. After writing deliberately to her
friend Emma, she laid down her pen and thought of nothing; and into
this dreamfulness a wine passed, filling her veins, suffusing her mind,
quickening her soul: and coming whence? out of air, out of the yonder of
air. She could have imagined a seraphic presence in the room, that bade
her arise and live; take the cup of the wells of youth arrested at her
lips by her marriage; quit her wintry bondage for warmth, light, space,
the quick of simple being. And the strange pure ecstasy was not a
transient electrification; it came in waves on a continuous tide;
looking was living; walking flying. She hardly knew that she slept. The
heights she had seen rosy at eve were marked for her ascent in the dawn.
Sleep was one wink, and fresh as the dewy field and rockflowers on her
way upward, she sprang to more and more of heaven, insatiable, happily
chirruping over her possessions. The threading of the town among
the dear common people before others were abroad, was a pleasure and
pleasant her solitariness threading the gardens at the base of the rock,
only she astir; and the first rough steps of the winding footpath, the
first closed buds, the sharper air, the uprising of the mountain with
her ascent; and pleasant too was her hunger and the nibble at a little
loaf of bread. A linnet sang in her breast, an eagle lifted her feet.
The feet were verily winged, as they are in a season of youth when
the blood leaps to light from the pressure of the under forces, like a
source at the wellheads, and the whole creature blooms, vital in every
energy as a spirit. To be a girl again was magical. She could fancy her
having risen from the dead. And to be a girl, with a woman's broader
vision and receptiveness of soul, with knowledge of evil, and winging to
ethereal happiness, this was a revelation of our human powers.

She attributed the change to the influences of nature's beauty and
grandeur. Nor had her woman's consciousness to play the chrysalis in
any shy recesses of her heart; she was nowhere veiled or torpid; she was
illumined, like the Salvatore she saw in the evening beams and mounted
in the m