“Ah me! it was terrible, but they had not the love to give. The face was so polished and smooth, because there was no sorrow in the heart—and drearily, often, no heart to be touched. I could not wonder that the noble heart of devotion was broken, for it had dashed itself against a stone. I wept, until my spectacles were dimmed, for those hopeless lovers; but there was a pang beyond tears for those icy statues.

“Still a boy, I was thus too much a man in knowledge—I did not comprehend the sights I was compelled to see. I used to tear my glasses away from my eyes and, frightened at myself, run to escape my own consciousness. Reaching the small house where we then lived, I plunged into my grandmother’s room, and, throwing myself upon the floor, buried my face in her lap, and sobbed myself to sleep with premature grief.

“But when I awakened, and felt her cool hand upon my hot forehead, and heard the low sweet song, or the gentle story, or the tenderly told parable from the Bible, with which she tried to soothe me, I could not resist the mystic fascination that lured me, as I lay in her lap, to steal a glance at her through the spectacles.

“Pictures of the Madonna have not her rare and pensive beauty. Upon the tranquil little islands her life had been eventless, and all the fine possibilities of her nature were like flowers that never bloomed. Placid were all her years; yet I have read of no heroine, of no woman great in sudden crises, that it did not seem to me she might have been. The wife and widow of a man who loved his home better than the homes of others, I have yet heard of no queen, no belle, no imperial beauty, whom in grace, and brilliancy, and persuasive courtesy she might not have surpassed.

“Madam,” said Titbottom to my wife, whose heart hung upon his story, “your husband’s young friend, Aurelia, wears sometimes a camellia in her hair, and no diamond in the ballroom seems so costly as that perfect flower, which women envy, and for whose least and withered petal men sigh; yet, in the tropical solitudes of Brazil, how many a camellia bud drops from the bush that no eye has ever seen, which, had it flowered and been noticed, would have gilded all hearts with its memory.

“When I stole these furtive glances at my grandmother, half fearing that they were wrong, I saw only a calm lake, whose shores were low, and over which the sun hung unbroken, so that the least star was clearly reflected. It had an atmosphere of solemn twilight tranquillity, and so completely did its unruffled surface blend with the cloudless, star-studded sky that, when I looked through my spectacles at my grandmother, the vision seemed to me all heaven and stars.

“Yet, as I gazed and gazed, I felt what stately cities might well have been built upon those shores, and have flashed prosperity over the calm, like coruscations of pearls. I dreamed of gorgeous fleets, silken- sailed, and blown by perfumed winds, drifting over those depthless waters and through those spacious skies. I gazed upon the twilight, the inscrutable silence, like a God-fearing discoverer upon a new and vast sea bursting upon him through forest glooms, and in the fervour of whose impassioned gaze a millennial and poetic world arises, and man need no longer die to be happy.

“My companions naturally deserted me for I had grown wearily grave and abstracted: and, unable to resist the allurements of my spectacles, I was constantly lost in the world of which those companions were part, yet of which they knew nothing.

“I grew cold and hard, almost morose; people seemed to me so blind and unreasonable. They did the wrong thing. They called green, yellow; and black, white. Young men said of a girl, ‘What a lovely, simple creature!’ I looked, and there was only a glistening wisp of straw, dry and hollow. Or they said ‘What a cold, proud beauty!’ I looked, and lo! a Madonna, whose heart held the world. Or they said, ‘What a wild, giddy girl!’ and I saw a glancing, dancing mountain stream, pure as the virgin snows whence it flowed, singing through sun and shade, over pearls and gold dust, slipping along unstained by weed or rain, or heavy foot of cattle, touching the flowers with a dewy kiss—a beam of grace, a happy song, a line of light, in the dim and troubled landscape.