ouded in herself, which gave her more intimate and vital union with
all the influences of the universe, a companion to her loneliness, an
angel hymning low to her own listening soul. This made her enjoyment of
Nature, in its merest trifles, exquisite and profound; this gave to her
tenderness of heart all the delicious and sportive variety love
borrows from imagination; this lifted her piety above the mere forms of
conventional religion, and breathed into her prayers the ecstasy of the
saint.

But Helen was not the less filled with the sweet humanities of her age
and sex; her very gravity was tinged with rosy light, as a western cloud
with the sun. She had sportiveness and caprice, and even whim, as the
butterfly, though the emblem of the soul, still flutters wantonly over
every wild-flower, and expands its glowing wings on the sides of the
beaten road. And with a sense of weakness in the common world (growing
out of her very strength in nobler atmospheres), she leaned the more
trustfully on the strong arm of her young adorer, not fancying that the
difference between them arose from superiority in her; but rather as a
bird, once tamed, flies at the sight of the hawk to the breast of its
owner, so from each airy flight into the loftier heaven, let but the
thought of danger daunt her wing, and, as in a more powerful nature, she
took refuge on that fostering heart.

The love between these children--for so, if not literally in years, in
their newness to all that steals the freshness and the dew from maturer
life they may be rightly called--was such as befitted those whose souls
have not forfeited the Eden. It was more like the love of fairies than
of human beings. They showed it to each other innocently and frankly;
yet of love as we of the grosser creation call it, with its impatient
pains and burning hopes, they never spoke nor dreamed. It was an
unutterable, ecstatic fondness, a clinging to each other in thought,
desire, and heart, a joy more than mortal in each other's presence; yet,
in parting, not that idle and empty sorrow which unfits the weak for
the homelier demands on time and life, and this because of the wondrous
trust in themselves and in the future, which made a main part of their
credulous, happy natures. Neither felt fear nor jealousy, or if jealousy
came, it was the pretty, childlike jealousies which have no sting,--of
the bird, if Helen listened to its note too long; of the flower, if
Percival left Helen'