though the old elm knows
it not, a new creation is at hand. Just so, ever since the good man had
lived at Mrs. Scudder's, and had the gentle Mary for his catechumen, a
richer life seemed to have colored his thoughts,--his mind seemed to
work with a pleasure as never before.

Whoever looked on the forehead of the good Doctor must have seen the
squareness of ideality giving marked effect to its outline. As yet
ideality had dealt only with the intellectual and invisible, leading to
subtile refinements of argument and exalted ideas of morals. But there
was lying in him, crude and unworked, a whole mine of those artistic
feelings and perceptions which are awakened and developed only by the
touch of beauty. Had he been born beneath the shadow of the great Duomo
of Florence, where Giotto's Campanile rises like the slender stalk of
a celestial lily, where varied marbles and rainbow-glass and gorgeous
paintings and lofty statuary call forth, even from childhood, the soul's
reminiscences of the bygone glories of its pristine state, his would
have been a soul as rounded and full in its sphere of faculties as that
of Da Vinci or Michel Angelo. But of all that he was as ignorant as a
child; and the first revelation of his dormant nature was to come to him
through the face of woman,--that work of the Mighty Master which is to
be found in all lands and ages.

What makes the love of a great mind something fearful in its inception
is that it is often the unsealing of a hitherto undeveloped portion of
a large and powerful being; the woman may or may not seem to other eyes
adequate to the effect produced, but the man cannot forget her, because
with her came a change which makes him forever a different being. So it
was with our friend. A woman it was that was destined to awaken in him
all that consciousness which music, painting, poetry awaken in more
evenly developed minds; and it is the silent breathing of her creative
presence that is even now creating him anew, while as yet he knows it
not.

He never thought, this good old soul, whether Mary were beautiful or
not; he never even knew that he looked at her; nor did he know why it
was that the truths of his theology, when uttered by her tongue, had
such a wondrous beauty as he never felt before. He did not know why it
was, that, when she silently sat by him, copying tangled manuscript for
the press, as she sometimes did, his whole study seemed so full of some
divine influence, as if, l