arm as any that she possessed. Beauty, it is
true, and beauty almost perfect in its own style, was indispensable.
Had Phoebe been coarse in feature, shaped clumsily, of a harsh voice,
and uncouthly mannered, she might have been rich with all good gifts,
beneath this unfortunate exterior, and still, so long as she wore the
guise of woman, she would have shocked Clifford, and depressed him by
her lack of beauty. But nothing more beautiful--nothing prettier, at
least--was ever made than Phoebe. And, therefore, to this man,--whose
whole poor and impalpable enjoyment of existence heretofore, and until
both his heart and fancy died within him, had been a dream,--whose
images of women had more and more lost their warmth and substance, and
been frozen, like the pictures of secluded artists, into the chillest
ideality,--to him, this little figure of the cheeriest household life
was just what he required to bring him back into the breathing world.
Persons who have wandered, or been expelled, out of the common track of
things, even were it for a better system, desire nothing so much as to
be led back. They shiver in their loneliness, be it on a mountain-top
or in a dungeon. Now, Phoebe's presence made a home about her,--that
very sphere which the outcast, the prisoner, the potentate,--the wretch
beneath mankind, the wretch aside from it, or the wretch above
it,--instinctively pines after,--a home! She was real! Holding her
hand, you felt something; a tender something; a substance, and a warm
one: and so long as you should feel its grasp, soft as it was, you
might be certain that your place was good in the whole sympathetic
chain of human nature. The world was no longer a delusion.

By looking a little further in this direction, we might suggest an
explanation of an often-suggested mystery. Why are poets so apt to
choose their mates, not for any similarity of poetic endowment, but for
qualities which might make the happiness of the rudest handicraftsman
as well as that of the ideal craftsman of the spirit? Because,
probably, at his highest elevation, the poet needs no human
intercourse; but he finds it dreary to descend, and be a stranger.

There was something very beautiful in the relation that grew up between
this pair, so closely and constantly linked together, yet with such a
waste of gloomy and mysterious years from his birthday to hers. On
Clifford's part it was the feeling of a man naturally endowed with the
livel