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!