down
before her: one on a piece of burnt-up turf, one on the dark flat
surface of a rock which the receding tide has left bare. The barren
surfaces are transfigured by their brightness. Just so will love settle
on the low or barren in life, and transform it.

VI.

READING A BOOK UNDER THE CLIFF.

She has reached the transition stage between struggle and resignation.
She accepts change and its disappointments as the law of life. We
discover this in her comment on the book in question, from which some
verses are introduced.[71] The author apostrophizes a moaning wind which
appeals to him as a voice of woe more eloquent than any which is given
to animal or man: and asks it what form of suffering, mental or bodily,
its sighs are trying to convey. James Lee's wife regards the mood here
expressed as characteristic of a youthful spirit, disposed to enlarge
upon the evils of existence by its over-weening consciousness of power
to understand, strength to escape or overcome them. Such a one, she
says, can only learn by sad experience what the wind in its moaning
means: that subtle change which arrests the course of happiness, as the
same wind, stirring however softly in a summer dawn, may annul the
promise of its beauty.

"Nothing can be as it has been before;
Better, so call it, only not the same.
To draw one beauty into our hearts' core,
And keep it changeless! such our claim;
So answered,--Never more!"

She who has learnt it, can only ask herself if this old world-sorrow be
cause for rejoicing through the onward impulse ever forced upon the
soul; if it be sent to us in probation. She cannot answer. God alone
knows. The fully realized significance of such death in life gives an
unutterable pathos to her concluding words.

VII.

AMONG THE ROCKS.

She accepts disappointment as also a purifier of love. A sunny autumn
morning is exercising its genial influence, and the courage of
self-effacement awakens in her. As earth blesses her smallest creatures
with her smile, so should love devote itself to those less worthy beings
who may be ennobled by it. Its rewards must be sought in heaven.

VIII.

BESIDE THE DRAWING-BOARD.

She accepts the duties of life as an equivalent for its happiness, i.e.,
for the happiness of love. She has been drawing from the cast of a
hand--enraptured with its delicate beauty--thinking how the rapture must
have risen into love in the artist who saw it