ity accepting the highest, noblest,
most self-devoting life presented to it, simultaneously with life's
deepest pain; and of humanity choosing something--in itself pure and
noble, but--short of the highest.

Fedalma is essentially a poetic Romola, but Romola so modified by
circumstances and temperament as to be superficially contrasting. She is
the Romola of a different race and clime, a different nurture, and an era
which, chronologically nearly the same, is in reality far removed. For
the warm and swift Italian we have the yet warmer and swifter Gypsy
blood; for the long line of noble ancestry, descent from an outcast and
degraded race; for the nurture amid the environments, almost in the creed
of classicism, the upbringing under noble female charge in a household of
that land where the Roman Church had just sealed its full supremacy by
the establishment of the Inquisition; for the era when Italian subtleties
of thought, policy, and action had attained their highest elaboration,
the grander and simpler time when

"Castilian gentlemen
_Choose_ not their task--they choose _to do it well_."

But howsoever modified through these and other accessories of existence
are the more superficial aspects of character, and the whole outward form
and course of life, the great vital principle is the same in
both;--clearness to see, nobleness to choose, steadfastness to pursue,
the highest good that life presents, through whatsoever anguish,
darkness, and death of all joy and hope the path may lead.

On Fedalma's first appearance on the wonderful scene upon the Placa, she
presents herself as emphatically what her poet-worshipper Juan hymns her,
the "child of light"--a creature so tremulously sensitive to all beauty,
brightness, and joy, that it seems as if she could not co-exist with
darkness and sorrow. But even then we have intimated to us that vital
quality in her nature which makes all self-sacrifice possible; and which
assures us that, whenever her life-choice shall come to lie between
enjoyment and right, she shall choose the higher though the harder path.
For her joy is essentially the joy of sympathy; mere self has no place in
it. In her exquisite justification of the Placa scene to Don Silva, she
herself defines it in one line better than all words of ours can do--

"_I_ was not, but joy was, and love and triumph."

She is but a form and presence in which the joy, not merely of the fair
sunset scen