en of all
the humped and crooked creatures! What could have been in her head when
she worked out such a fantasy? She has contrived to give them all beauty
or dignity or melancholy grace. A Bactrian camel lying under a palm. A
dromedary flashing up the sands,--spray of the dry ocean sailed by the
"ship of the desert." A herd of buffaloes, uncouth, shaggy-maned, heavy
in the forehand, light in the hind-quarter. [The buffalo is the lion of
the ruminants.] And there is a Norman horse, with his huge, rough collar,
echoing, as it were, the natural form of the other beast. And here are
twisted serpents; and stately swans, with answering curves in their bowed
necks, as if they had snake's blood under their white feathers; and
grave, high-shouldered herons standing on one foot like cripples, and
looking at life round them with the cold stare of monumental effigies.--A
very odd page indeed! Not a creature in it without a curve or a twist,
and not one of them a mean figure to look at. You can make your own
comment; I am fanciful, you know. I believe she is trying to idealize
what we vulgarly call deformity, which she strives to look at in the
light of one of Nature's eccentric curves, belonging to her system of
beauty, as the hyperbola, and parabola belong to the conic sections,
though we cannot see them as symmetrical and entire figures, like the
circle and ellipse. At any rate, I cannot help referring this paradise
of twisted spines to some idea floating in her head connected with her
friend whom Nature has warped in the moulding.--That is nothing to
another transcendental fancy of mine. I believe her soul thinks itself
in his little crooked body at times,--if it does not really get freed or
half freed from her own. Did you ever see a case of catalepsy? You know
what I mean,--transient loss of sense, will, and motion; body and limbs
taking any position in which they are put, as if they belonged to a
lay-figure. She had been talking with him and listening to him one day
when the boarders moved from the table nearly all at once. But she sat
as before, her cheek resting on her hand, her amber eyes wide open and
still. I went to her, she was breathing as usual, and her heart was
beating naturally enough,--but she did not answer. I bent her arm; it
was as plastic as softened wax, and kept the place I gave it.--This will
never do, though, and I sprinkled a few drops of water on her forehead.
She started and looked round