nward impulse which excites the body at the
instant when exertion is arrested? Did it come from the sudden contrast
between the glory of the sun and the darkness of the clouds, from whose
shadow the charming couple had just emerged? Perhaps to all these causes
we may add the effect of a phenomenon, one of the noblest which human
nature has to offer. If some able physiologist had studied this being
(who, judging by the pride on his brow and the lightning in his eyes
seemed a youth of about seventeen years of age), and if the student had
sought for the springs of that beaming life beneath the whitest skin
that ever the North bestowed upon her offspring, he would undoubtedly
have believed either in some phosphoric fluid of the nerves shining
beneath the cuticle, or in the constant presence of an inward luminary,
whose rays issued through the being of Seraphitus like a light through
an alabaster vase. Soft and slender as were his hands, ungloved to
remove his companion's snow-boots, they seemed possessed of a strength
equal to that which the Creator gave to the diaphanous tentacles of the
crab. The fire darting from his vivid glance seemed to struggle with the
beams of the sun, not to take but to give them light. His body, slim and
delicate as that of a woman, gave evidence of one of those natures which
are feeble apparently, but whose strength equals their will, rendering
them at times powerful. Of medium height, Seraphitus appeared to grow in
stature as he turned fully round and seemed about to spring upward. His
hair, curled by a fairy's hand and waving to the breeze, increased
the illusion produced by this aerial attitude; yet his bearing, wholly
without conscious effort, was the result far more of a moral phenomenon
than of a corporal habit.

Minna's imagination seconded this illusion, under the dominion of which
all persons would assuredly have fallen,--an illusion which gave to
Seraphitus the appearance of a vision dreamed of in happy sleep. No
known type conveys an image of that form so majestically made to Minna,
but which to the eyes of a man would have eclipsed in womanly grace the
fairest of Raphael's creations. That painter of heaven has ever put
a tranquil joy, a loving sweetness, into the lines of his angelic
conceptions; but what soul, unless it contemplated Seraphitus himself,
could have conceived the ineffable emotions imprinted on his face? Who
would have divined, even in the dreams of artists, where all t