As
for myself, while going homeward, I reflected with astonishment on the
unflagging spiritual energy with which, for hour after hour, she
had swept over lands and seas of thought, and, as my own excitement
cooled, I became conscious of exhaustion, as if a week's life had been
concentrated in a day.
The interview, thus hastily sketched, may serve as a fair type of our
usual intercourse. Always I found her open-eyed to beauty, fresh for
wonder, with wings poised for flight, and fanning the coming breeze of
inspiration. Always she seemed to see before her,
"A shape all light, which with one hand did fling
Dew on the earth, as if she were the dawn,
And the invisible rain did ever sing
A silver music on the mossy lawn."
Yet more and more distinctly did I catch a plaintive tone of sorrow
in her thought and speech, like the wail of an AEolian harp heard at
intervals from some upper window. She had never met one who could love
her as she could love; and in the orange-grove of her affections
the white, perfumed blossoms and golden fruit wasted away unclaimed.
Through the mask of slight personal defects and ungraceful manners,
of superficial hauteur and egotism, and occasional extravagance of
sentiment, no equal had recognized the rare beauty of her spirit.
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