, and walked homewards, along the
brook-side and through the burial-ground, with the alert step and the
uplifted head of a man who has joy in life and admits of no fear in
death.

CHAPTER XIV.

FOR the next two weeks or so Kenelm and Lily met not indeed so often
as the reader might suppose, but still frequently; five times at Mrs.
Braefield's, once again at the vicarage, and twice when Kenelm had
called at Grasmere; and, being invited to stay to tea at one of those
visits, he stayed the whole evening. Kenelm was more and more fascinated
in proportion as he saw more and more of a creature so exquisitely
strange to his experience. She was to him not only a poem, but a poem in
the Sibylline Books; enigmatical, perplexing conjecture, and somehow or
other mysteriously blending its interest with visions of the future.

Lily was indeed an enchanting combination of opposites rarely blended
into harmony. Her ignorance of much that girls know before they number
half her years was so relieved by candid, innocent simplicity, so
adorned by pretty fancies and sweet beliefs, and so contrasted and lit
up by gleams of a knowledge that the young ladies we call well educated
seldom exhibit,--knowledge derived from quick observation of external
Nature, and impressionable susceptibility to its varying and subtle
beauties. This knowledge had been perhaps first instilled, and
subsequently nourished, by such poetry as she had not only learned by
heart, but taken up as inseparable from the healthful circulation of her
thoughts; not the poetry of our own day,--most young ladies know enough
of that,--but selected fragments from the verse of old, most of them
from poets now little read by the young of either sex, poets dear to
spirits like Coleridge or Charles Lamb,--none of them, however, so dear
to her as the solemn melodies of Milton. Much of such poetry she had
never read in books: it had been taught her in childhood by her guardian
the painter. And with all this imperfect, desultory culture, there was
such dainty refinement in her every look and gesture, and such deep
woman-tenderness of heart. Since Kenelm had commended "Numa Pompilius"
to her study, she had taken very lovingly to that old-fashioned romance,
and was fond of talking to him about Egeria as of a creature who had
really existed.

But what was the effect that he,--the first man of years correspondent
to her own with whom she had ever familiarly conversed,--what was the
e