presence without
acknowledging the perfection of her form as a woman, and rendering the
passionate yet subdued homage which the purest beauty fulfills its
human errand by inspiring; but, while Palgray made the halo which
surrounded her outward beauty the whole orbit of his appreciation, and
made of it, too, the measure of the circle of topics he chose to talk
upon, there was still another and far wider ring of light about her,
which he lived in too dazzling a gayety of his own to see--a halo of
a mind more beautiful than the body which shut it in; and in this
intellectual orbit of guidance to interchange of mind, with manifold
deeper and higher reach than Palgray's, upon whatever topic chanced to
occur, revolved I, around her who was the loveliest and most gifted of
all the human beings I had been privileged to meet.

PART IV.

The month was expiring at Vallambrosa, but I had not mingled, for that
length of time, with a fraternity of thoughtful men, without
recognition of some of that working of spontaneous and elective
magnetism to which I have alluded in a previous part of this story.
Opposite me, at the table of the convent refectory, had sat a taciturn
monk, whose influence I felt from the first day--a stronger
consciousness of his presence, that is to say, than of any one of the
other monks--though he did not seem particularly to observe me, and
till recently had scarce spoken to me at all. He was a man of perhaps
fifty years of age, with the countenance of one who had suffered and
gained a victory of contemplation--a look as if no suffering could be
new to him, and before whom no riddle of human vicissitudes could stay
unread; but over all this penetration and sagacity was diffused a cast
of genial philanthropy and good-fellowship which told of his
forgiveness of the world for what he had suffered in it. With a
curiosity more at leisure, I should have sought him out, and joined
him in his walks to know more of him; but spiritually acquainted
though I felt we had become, I was far too busy with head and heart
for any intercourse, except it had a bearing on the struggle for love
that I was, to all appearance, so hopelessly making.

Preparations were beginning for departure, and with the morrow, or the
day after, I was to take my way to Venice--my friends bound to
Switzerland and England, and propriety not permitting me to seek
another move in their company. The evening on which this was made
clear to me