Whatever can to sight or thought be form'd,
Holy, divine, good, amiable, or sweet"--

even now, when she appeared in league with an eternity of woe, and
ministering to his ruin, could not be displaced for him by any better or
happier Eve. "Loss of thee!" he exclaims in this anguish of trial--

"Loss of thee
Would never from my heart; no, no, I feel
The link of nature draw me; flesh of flesh,
Bone of my bone thou art; and from thy state
Mine never shall be parted, bliss or woe."[5]

But what was it that drew my heart, by gravitation so strong, to my
sister? Could a child, little above six years of age, place any special
value upon her intellectual forwardness? Serene and capacious as her mind
appeared to me upon after review, was _that_ a charm for stealing away the
heart of an infant? Oh, no! I think of it _now_ with interest, because it
lends, in a stranger's ear, some justification to the excess of my
fondness. But then it was lost upon me; or, if not lost, was but dimly
perceived. Hadst thou been an idiot, my sister, not the less I must have
loved thee--having that capacious heart overflowing, even as mine
overflowed, with tenderness, and stung, even as mine was stung, by the
necessity of being loved. This it was which crowned thee with beauty--

"Love, the holy sense,
Best gift of God, in thee was most intense."

That lamp lighted in Paradise was kindled for me which shone so steadily
in thee; and never but to thee only, never again since thy departure,
_durst_ I utter the feelings which possessed me. For I was the shiest of
children; and a natural sense of personal dignity held me back at all
stages of life, from exposing the least ray of feelings which I was not
encouraged _wholly_ to reveal.

It would be painful, and it is needless, to pursue the course of that
sickness which carried off my leader and companion. She (according to my
recollection at this moment) was just as much above eight years as I above
six. And perhaps this natural precedency in authority of judgment, and the
tender humility with which she declined to assert it, had been amongst the
fascinations of her presence. It was upon a Sunday evening, or so people
fancied, that the spark of fatal fire fell upon that train of
predispositions to a brain-complaint which had hitherto slumbered within
her. She had been permitted to drink tea at the house of a labouring man,
the father of an old female serva