e mischief and set nations by the ears before Helen was born? If
jealousies that gnaw men's hearts out of their bodies,--if pangs that
waste men to shadows and drive them into raving madness or moping
melancholy,--if assassination and suicide are dreadful possibilities,
then there is always something frightful about a lovely young woman.--I
love to look at this "Rainbow," as her father used sometimes to call
her, of ours. Handsome creature that she is in forms and colors,--the
very picture, as it seems to me, of that "golden blonde" my friend whose
book you read last year fell in love with when he was a boy, (as you
remember, no doubt,)--handsome as she is, fit for a sea-king's bride, it
is not her beauty alone that holds my eyes upon her. Let me tell you
one of my fancies, and then you will understand the strange sort of
fascination she has for me.

It is in the hearts of many men and women--let me add children--that
there is a Great Secret waiting for them,--a secret of which they get
hints now and then, perhaps oftener in early than in later years.
These hints come sometimes in dreams, sometimes in sudden startling
flashes,--second wakings, as it were,--a waking out of the waking state,
which last is very apt to be a half-sleep. I have many times stopped
short and held my breath, and felt the blood leaving my cheeks, in one
of these sudden clairvoyant flashes. Of course I cannot tell what
kind of a secret this is, but I think of it as a disclosure of
certain relations of our personal being to time and space, to other
intelligences, to the procession of events, and to their First Great
Cause. This secret seems to be broken up, as it were, into fragments,
so that we find here a word and there a syllable, and then again only a
letter of it; but it never is written out for most of us as a complete
sentence, in this life. I do not think it could be; for I am disposed to
consider our beliefs about such a possible disclosure rather as a kind
of premonition of an enlargement of our faculties in some future state
than as an expectation to be fulfilled for most of us in this life.
Persons, however, have fallen into trances,--as did the Reverend William
Tennent, among many others,--and learned some things which they could
not tell in our human words.

Now among the visible objects which hint to us fragments of this
infinite secret for which our souls are waiting, the faces of women are
those that carry the most legible hierogl