at her now, Ianthe, and confess that surely that countenance breathes
more beauty than chiselled features can give." And certainly, whether
some mesmeric influence from her enthusiastic Fairy Godmother was
working on Hermione's brain, or whether her own quotation upon the
doomed tree had stirred up other poetical recollections, I know not;
but as she was retracing her steps homewards, she repeated to herself
softly but with much pathos, Coleridge's lines:[2]

"O lady, we receive but what we give,
And in our life alone does nature live:
Ours is her wedding-garment, ours her shroud!
And would we aught behold, of higher worth,
Than that inanimate cold world allowed
To the poor loveless ever anxious crowd,
Ah! from the soul itself must issue forth
A light, a glory, a fair luminous cloud
Enveloping the earth--
And from the soul itself must there be sent
A sweet and potent voice, of its own birth,
Of all sweet sounds the life and element!"

[2] Coleridge's "Dejection: an Ode."

And, turning through the little handgate at the extremity of the wood,
she pursued the train of thought with heightened colour in her
cheeks--

"I may not hope from outward forms to win
The passion and the life, whose fountains are within."