e, but primarily and emphatically of the human hearts around
her, enshrines itself. It has no free life in herself apart from others;
it must inevitably die if shut out from this tremulousness of human
sympathy. And we know it shall give place to a sorrow correspondingly
sensitive, intense, and absorbing, whenever the young bright spirit is
brought face to face with human sorrow. Even while we gaze on her as the
embodied joy, and love, and triumph of the scene, the shadow begins to
fall. The band of Gypsy prisoners passes by, and her eyes meet those
eyes whose gaze, not to be so read by any nature lower and more
superficial than hers--

"Seemed to say he bore
The pain of those who never could be saved."

Joy collapses at once within her; the light fades away from the scene;
the very sunset glory becomes dull and cold. We are shown from the first
that no life can satisfy this "child of light" which shall not be a life
in the fullest and deepest unison to which circumstances shall call her
with the life of humanity. That true greatness of our humanity is
already active within her, which makes it impossible she should live or
die to herself alone. Her destiny is already marked out by a force of
which circumstance may determine the special manifestation, but which no
force of circumstance can turn aside from its course; the force of a
living spiritual power within herself which constrains that she shall be
faithful to the highest good which life shall place before her.

We would fain linger for a little over the scenes which follow between
her and Don Silva; portraying as they do a love so intense in its virgin
tenderness, and so spiritually pure and high. It is the same "child of
light" that comes before us here; the same tremulous living in the light
and joy of her love, but also the same impossibility of living even in
its light and joy apart from those of her beloved. And not from his
only: that passion which in more ordinary natures so almost inevitably
contracts the sphere of the sympathies, in Fedalma expands and enlarges
it. Amid all the intoxicating sweetness of her bright young joys, the
loving heart turns again and again to the thought of human sorrow and
wrong; and among all the hopes that gladden her future, one is never
absent from her thoughts--"Oh! I shall have much power as well as joy;"
power to redress the wrong and to assuage the suffering. Half playfully,
half seriously, she