t both palm and fountain. So on and
on he went, saying to the palm, "Thou art for another;" and to
the gentle waters, "I will return."

'Not far distant was he when the sirocco came, and choked with
sand the fountain, and uprooted the fruit-trees. When years
have passed, the waters will have forced themselves up again
to light, and a new oasis will await a new wanderer. Thou,
Sohrab, wilt, ere that time, have left thy bones at Mecca.
Yet the remembrance of the fountain cheers thee as a blessing;
that of the palm haunts thee as a pang.

'So talks the soft spring gale of the Shah Nameh. Genuine
Sanscrit I cannot write. My Persian and Arabic you love not.
Why do I write thus to one who must ever regard the deepest
tones of my nature as those of childish fancy or worldly
discontent?'

PROBLEMS OF LIFE.

Already, too, at this time, each of the main problems of human life
had been closely scanned and interrogated by her, and some of them had
been much earlier settled. A worshipper of beauty, why could not she
also have been beautiful?--of the most radiant sociality, why should
not she have been so placed, and so decorated, as to have led the
fairest and highest? In her journal is a bitter sentence, whose
meaning I cannot mistake: 'Of a disposition that requires the most
refined, the most exalted tenderness, without charms to inspire
it:--poor Mignon! fear not the transition through death; no penal
fires can have in store worse torments than thou art familiar with
already.'

In the month of May, she writes:--

'When all things are blossoming, it seems so strange not to
blossom too; that the quick thought within cannot remould its
tenement. Man is the slowest aloes, and I am such a shabby
plant, of such coarse tissue. I hate not to be beautiful, when
all around is so.'

Again, after recording a visit to a family, whose taste and culture,
united to the most liberal use of wealth, made the most agreeable of
homes, she writes:

'Looking out on the wide view, I felt the blessings of my
comparative freedom. I stand in no false relations. Who else
is so happy? Here are these fair, unknowing children envying
the depth of my mental life. They feel withdrawn by sweet
duties from reality. Spirit! I accept; teach me to prize and
use whatsoever is given me.'

'At present,' she writes elsewhere, 'it skills not. I am