ming ourselves to survey all things with the spirit that retains
and reproduces them only in their lovelier or grander aspects, a vast
philosophy of toleration for what we before gazed on with scorn or hate
insensibly grows upon us. Leonard looked into his heart after the
enchantress had breathed upon it; and through the mists of the fleeting
and tender melancholy which betrayed where she had been, he beheld a new
sun of delight and joy dawning over the landscape of human life.

Thus, though she was dead and gone from his actual knowledge, this
mysterious kinswoman--"a voice, and nothing more"--had spoken to him,
soothed, elevated, cheered, attuned each discord into harmony; and if
now permitted from some serener sphere to behold the life that her soul
thus strangely influenced, verily, with yet holier joy, the saving and
lovely spirit might have glided onward in the eternal progress.

We call the large majority of human lives _obscure_. Presumptuous that
we are! How know we what lives a single thought retained from the dust
of nameless graves may have lighted to renown?

CHAPTER XI.

It was about a year after Leonard's discovery of the family MSS. that
Parson Dale borrowed the quietest pad mare in the Squire's stables, and
set out on an equestrian excursion. He said that he was bound on
business connected with his old parishioners of Lansmere; for, as it has
been incidentally implied in a previous chapter, he had been connected
with that borough town (and I may here add, in the capacity of curate)
before he had been inducted into the living of Hazeldean.

It was so rarely that the Parson stirred from home, that this journey to
a town more than twenty miles off was regarded as a most daring
adventure, both at the Hall and at the Parsonage. Mrs. Dale could not
sleep the whole previous night with thinking of it; and though she had
naturally one of her worst nervous headaches on the eventful morn, she
yet suffered no hands less thoughtful than her own to pack up the
saddle-bags which the Parson had borrowed along with the pad. Nay, so
distrustful was she of the possibility of the good man's exerting the
slightest common sense in her absence, that she kept him close at her
side while she was engaged in that same operation of packing up--showing
him the exact spot in which the clean shirt was put, and how nicely the
old slippers were packed up in one of his own sermons. She implored him
not to mistake the sandwiches fo