eristic excellence stimulated
to the highest point. Once in an age, God sends to some of us a friend
who loves in us, _not_ a false imagining, an unreal character, but,
looking through all the rubbish of our imperfections, loves in us the
divine ideal of our nature,--loves, not the man that we are, but the
angel that we may be. Such friends seem inspired by a divine gift of
prophecy,--like the mother of St. Augustine, who, in the midst of the
wayward, reckless youth of her son, beheld him in a vision, standing,
clothed in white, a ministering priest at the right hand of God,--as he
has stood for long ages since. Could a mysterious foresight unveil to us
this resurrection form of the friends with whom we daily walk, compassed
about with mortal infirmity, we should follow them with faith and
reverence through all the disguises of human faults and weaknesses,
"waiting for the manifestation of the sons of God."

But these wonderful soul-friends, to whom God grants such perception,
are the exceptions in life; yet sometimes are we blessed with one who
sees through us, as Michel Angelo saw through a block of marble, when he
attacked it in a divine fervor, declaring that an angel was imprisoned
within it;--and it is often the resolute and delicate hand of such a
friend that sets the angel free.

There be soul-artists, who go through this world, looking among their
fellows with reverence, as one looks amid the dust and rubbish of old
shops for hidden works of Titian and Leonardo, and, finding them,
however cracked or torn or painted over with tawdry daubs of pretenders,
immediately recognize the divine original, and set themselves to cleanse
and restore. Such be God's real priests, whose ordination and anointing
are from the Holy Spirit; and he who hath not this enthusiasm is not
ordained of God, though whole synods of bishops laid hands on him.

Many such priests there be among women;--for to this silent ministry
their nature calls them, endowed, as it is, with fineness of fibre, and
a subtile keenness of perception outrunning slow-footed reason;--and she
of whom we write was one of these.

At this very moment, while the crimson wings of morning were casting
delicate reflections on tree, and bush, and rock, they were also
reddening innumerable waves round a ship that sailed alone, with a wide
horizon stretching like an eternity around it; and in the advancing
morning stood a young man thoughtfully looking off into the ocean,