There is a certain frankness and directness about her that perhaps
belong to her artist nature. For, you see, the one thing that marks the
true artist is a clear perception and a firm, bold hand, in distinction
from that imperfect mental vision and uncertain touch which give us the
feeble pictures and the lumpy statues of the mere artisans on canvas or
in stone. A true artist, therefore, can hardly fail to have a sharp,
well-defined character. Besides this, many young girls have a strange
audacity blended with their instinctive delicacy. Even in physical
daring many of them are a match for boys; whereas you will find few
among mature women, and especially if they are mothers, who do not
confess, and not unfrequently proclaim, their timidity. One of these
young girls, as many of us hereabouts remember, climbed to the top of a
jagged, slippery rock lying out in the waves,--an ugly height to get up,
and a worse one to get down, even for a bold young fellow of sixteen.
Another was in the way of climbing tall trees for crows' nests,--and
crows generally know about how far boys can "shin up," and set their
household establishments above high-water-mark. Still another of these
young ladies I saw for the first time in an open boat, tossing on the
ocean ground-swell, a mile or two from shore, off a lonely island. She
lost all her daring, after she had some girls of her own to look out
for.

Many blondes are very gentle, yielding in character, impressible,
unelastic. But the _positive_ blondes, with the golden tint running
through them, are often full of character. They come from those
deep-bosomed German women that Tacitus portrayed in such strong colors.
The _negative_ blondes, or those women whose tints have faded out as
their line of descent has become impoverished, are of various blood, and
in them the soul has often become pale with that blanching of the hair
and loss of color in the eyes which makes them approach the character of
Albinesses.

I see in this young girl that union of strength and sensibility which,
when directed and impelled by the strong instinct so apt to accompany
this combination of active and passive capacity, we call _genius_. She
is not an accomplished artist, certainly, as yet; but there is always an
air in every careless figure she draws, as it were of upward
aspiration,--the _elan_ of John of Bologna's Mercury,--a lift to them,
as if they had on winged sandals, like the herald of the gods. I hear