t to music. A miracle alone
could have made Baxter a poet; the cold, clear light of reason "paled the
ineffectual fires" of his imagination; all things presented themselves to
his vision "with hard outlines, colorless, and with no surrounding
atmosphere." That he did, nevertheless, write verses, so creditable as
to justify a judicious modern critic in their citation and approval, can
perhaps be accounted for only as one of the phenomena of that subtle and
transforming influence to which even his stern nature was unconsciously
yielding. Baxter was in love.

Never did the blind god try his archery on a more unpromising subject.
Baxter was nearly fifty years of age, and looked still older. His life
had been one long fast and penance. Even in youth he had never known a
schoolboy's love for cousin or playmate. He had resolutely closed up his
heart against emotions which he regarded as the allurements of time and
sense. He had made a merit of celibacy, and written and published
against the entanglement of godly ministers in matrimonial engagements
and family cares. It is questionable whether he now understood his own
case, or attributed to its right cause the peculiar interest which he
felt in Margaret Charlton. Left to himself, it is more than probable
that he might never have discovered the true nature of that interest, or
conjectured that anything whatever of earthly passion or sublunary
emotion had mingled with his spiritual Platonism. Commissioned and set
apart to preach repentance to dying men, penniless and homeless, worn
with bodily pain and mental toil, and treading, as he believed, on the
very margin of his grave, what had he to do with love? What power had he
to inspire that tender sentiment, the appropriate offspring only of
youth, and health, and beauty?

"Could any Beatrice see
A lover in such anchorite!"

But in the mean time a reciprocal feeling was gaining strength in the
heart of Margaret. To her grateful appreciation of the condescension of
a great and good man--grave, learned, and renowned--to her youth and
weakness, and to her enthusiastic admiration of his intellectual powers,
devoted to the highest and holiest objects, succeeded naturally enough
the tenderly suggestive pity of her woman's heart, as she thought of his
lonely home, his unshared sorrows, his lack of those sympathies and
kindnesses which make tolerable the hard journey of life. Did she n