th a curious individuality. Mrs. Holland stood in
the place of some good aunt, and Sandford and Merton were regarded just
like real brothers.

She had no one to speak to about poetry; she did not know there was such
a thing in the world. Yet she was conscious of strange and delicious
sensations, when in the early days of spring she had at length conquered
Elspie's fears about wet feet and muddy fields, and had gone with her
nurse to take the first meadow ramble; she could not help bounding to
pluck every daisy she saw; and when the violets came, and the
primroses, she was out of her wits with joy. She had never even heard of
Wordsworth; yet, as she listened to the first cuckoo note, she thought
it no bird, but truly "a wandering voice." Of Shelley's glorious lyric
ode she knew nothing; and yet she never heard the skylark's song
without thinking it a spirit of the air, or one of the angels hymning
at Heaven's gate. And many a time she looked up in the clouds at early
morning, half expecting to see that gate open, and wondering whereabouts
it was in the beautiful sky.

She had never heard of Art, yet there was something in the gorgeous
sunset that made her bosom thrill; and out of the cloud-ranges she tried
to form mountains such as there were in Scotland, and palaces of crystal
like those she read of in her fairy tales. No human being had ever told
her of the mysterious links that reach from the finite to the infinite,
out of which, from the buried ashes of dead Superstition, great souls
can evoke those mighty spirits, Faith and Knowledge; yet she went to
sleep every night believing that she felt, nay, could almost see, an
angel standing at the foot of her little bed, watching her with holy
eyes, guarding her with outspread wings.

O Childhood! beautiful dream of unconscious poetry; of purity so pure
that it knew neither the existence of sin nor of its own innocence; of
happiness so complete, that the thought, "I am now happy," came not to
drive away the wayward sprite which never _is_, but always is to come!
Blessed Childhood! spent in peace and loneliness and dreams; hidden
therein lay the germs of a whole life.

CHAPTER VIII.

Olive Rothesay was twelve years old, and she had never learnt the
meaning of that word whose very sound seems a wail--sorrow. And that
other word, which is the dirge of the whole earth--death--was still to
her only a name. She knew there was such a thing; she read of it in her
books;