oning
them--even the "external presentment"--to be livingly rendered in a
formal sketch. I may tell you his eyes are pale blue, his features
regular, his hair silky, brownish, his legs long, his head rather
stooping (only the head), his mouth commonly closed; these are the facts,
and you have seen much the same in a nursery doll. Such literary craft is
of the nursery. So with landscapes. The art of the pen (we write on
darkness) is to rouse the inward vision, instead of labouring with a
Drop-scene brush, as if it were to the eye; because our flying minds
cannot contain a protracted description. That is why the poets, who
spring imagination with a word or a phrase, paint lasting pictures. The
Shakespearian, the Dantesque, are in a line, two at most. He lends an
attentive ear when I speak, agrees or has a quaint pucker of the eyebrows
dissenting inwardly. He lacks mental liveliness--cheerfulness, I should
say, and is thankful to have it imparted. One suspects he would be a dull
domestic companion. He has a veritable thirst for hopeful views of the
world, and no spiritual distillery of his own. He leans to depression.
Why! The broken reed you call your Tony carries a cargo, all of her
manufacture--she reeks of secret stills; and here is a young man--a
sapling oak--inclined to droop. His nature has an air of imploring me que
je d'arrose! I begin to perform Mrs. Dr. Pangloss on purpose to brighten
him--the mind, the views. He is not altogether deficient in
conversational gaiety, and he shines in exercise. But the world is a poor
old ball bounding down a hill--to an Irish melody in the evening
generally, by request. So far of Mr. Percy Dacier, of whom I have some
hopes--distant, perhaps delusive--that he may be of use to our cause. He
listens. It is an auspicious commencement.'

Lugano is the Italian lake most lovingly encircled by mountain arms, and
every height about it may be scaled with esce. The heights have their
nest of waters below for a home scene, the southern Swiss peaks, with
celestial Monta Rosa, in prospect. It was there that Diana reawakened,
after the trance of a deadly draught, to the glory of the earth and her
share in it. She wakened like the Princess of the Kiss; happily not to
kisses; to no sign, touch or call that she could trace backward. The
change befell her without a warning. After writing deliberately to her
friend Emma, she laid down her pen and thought of nothing; and into this
dreamfulness a wine