CHAPTER 3.II.
Gilding pale streams with heavenly alchemy.
Shakespeare.
Who so happy as Viola now! A dark load was lifted from her
heart: her step seemed to tread on air; she would have sung for
very delight as she went gayly home. It is such happiness to the
pure to love,--but oh, such more than happiness to believe in the
worth of the one beloved. Between them there might be human
obstacles,--wealth, rank, man's little world. But there was no
longer that dark gulf which the imagination recoils to dwell on,
and which separates forever soul from soul. He did not love her
in return. Love her! But did she ask for love? Did she herself
love? No; or she would never have been at once so humble and so
bold. How merrily the ocean murmured in her ear; how radiant an
aspect the commonest passer-by seemed to wear! She gained her
home,--she looked upon the tree, glancing, with fantastic
branches, in the sun. "Yes, brother mine!" she said, laughing in
her joy, "like thee, I HAVE struggled to the light!"
She had never hitherto, like the more instructed Daughters of the
North, accustomed herself to that delicious Confessional, the
transfusion of thought to writing. Now, suddenly, her heart felt
an impulse; a new-born instinct, that bade it commune with
itself, bade it disentangle its web of golden fancies,--made her
wish to look upon her inmost self as in a glass. Upsprung from
the embrace of Love and Soul--the Eros and the Psyche--their
beautiful offspring, Genius! She blushed, she sighed, she
trembled as she wrote. And from the fresh world that she had
built for herself, she was awakened to prepare for the glittering
stage. How dull became the music, how dim the scene, so
exquisite and so bright of old. Stage, thou art the Fairy Land
to the vision of the worldly. Fancy, whose music is not heard by
men, whose scenes shift not by mortal hand, as the stage to the
present world, art thou to the future and the past!
