advances? Is it Susan returned to youth? How like! Yet look again, and
how unlike! The same, the pure, candid regard; the same, the clear,
limpid blue of the eye; the same, that fair hue of the hair,--light, but
not auburn; more subdued, more harmonious than that equivocal colour
which too nearly approaches to red. But how much more blooming and
joyous than Susan's is that exquisite face in which all Hebe smiles
forth; how much airier the tread, light with health; how much rounder, if
slighter still, the wave of that undulating form! She smiles, her lips
move, she is conversing with herself; she cannot be all silent, even when
alone, for the sunny gladness of her nature must have vent like a bird's.
But do not fancy that that gladness speaks the levity which comes from
the absence of thought; it is rather from the depth of thought that it
springs, as from the depth of a sea comes its music. See, while she
pauses and listens, with her finger half-raised to her lip, as amidst
that careless jubilee of birds she hears a note more grave and
sustained,--the nightingale singing by day (as sometimes, though rarely,
he is heard,--perhaps because he misses his mate; perhaps because he sees
from his bower the creeping form of some foe to his race),--see, as she
listens now to that plaintive, low-chanted warble, how quickly the smile
is sobered, how the shade, soft and pensive, steals over the brow. It is
but the mystic sympathy with Nature that bestows the smile or the shade.
In that heart lightly moved beats the fine sense of the poet. It is the
exquisite sensibility of the nerves that sends its blithe play to those
spirits, and from the clearness of the atmosphere comes, warm and
ethereal, the ray of that light.

And does the roof of the pastor give shelter to Helen Mainwaring's youth?
Has Death taken from her the natural protectors? Those forms which we
saw so full of youth and youth's heart in that very spot, has the grave
closed on them yet? Yet! How few attain to the age of the Psalmist!