every period
and occupation. The distance showed, in a few bold outlines, a
dreary desert, broken by alpine ridges, and furrowed here and there
by a wandering watercourse. Long shadows pointed to the half-risen
sun, whose disc was climbing above the waste horizon. And in front
of the sun, down the path of the morning beams, came Woman, clothed
only in the armour of her own loveliness. Her bearing was stately,
and yet modest; in her face pensive tenderness seemed wedded with
earnest joy. In her right hand lay a cross, the emblem of self-
sacrifice. Her path across the desert was marked by the flowers
which sprang up beneath her steps; the wild gazelle stept forward
trustingly to lick her hand; a single wandering butterfly fluttered
round her head. As the group, one by one, caught sight of her, a
human tenderness and intelligence seemed to light up every face.
The scholar dropt his book, the miser his gold, the savage his
weapons; even in the visage of the half-slumbering sot some nobler
recollection seemed wistfully to struggle into life. The artist
caught up his pencil, the poet his lyre, with eyes that beamed forth
sudden inspiration. The sage, whose broad brow rose above the group
like some torrent furrowed Alp, scathed with all the temptations and
all the sorrows of his race, watched with a thoughtful smile that
preacher more mighty than himself. A youth, decked out in the most
fantastic fopperies of the middle age, stood with clasped hands and
brimming eyes, as remorse and pleasure struggled in his face; and as
he looked, the fierce sensual features seemed to melt, and his flesh
came again to him like the flesh of a little child. The slave
forgot his fetters; little children clapped their hands; and the
toil-worn, stunted, savage woman sprung forward to kneel at her
feet, and see herself transfigured in that new and divine ideal of
her sex.

Descriptions of drawings are clumsy things at best; the reader must
fill up the sketch for himself by the eye of faith.

Entranced in wonder and pleasure, Argemone let her eyes wander over
the drawing. And her feelings for Lancelot amounted almost to
worship, as she apprehended the harmonious unity of the manifold
conception,--the rugged boldness of the groups in front, the soft
grandeur of the figure which was the lodestar of all their emotions-
-the virginal purity of the whole. And when she fancied that she
traced in those b