could not find it; add to this, these long conversations, this
music, with its strange, vague suggestions, and even the
thousand novelties of the picturesque Italian life around her,
not one of which was lost on her impressionable little mind,
and we need not wonder that she began to suffer from an
excitement that gathered in strength from day to day. She grew
thin, morbid, nervous, ate almost nothing, and lost her usual
vivacity, sitting absorbed in dreamy fits, from which it was
difficult to arouse her, and which were very different from
the quiet, happy silence in which she used to remain contented
by her father's side for hours. All night she was haunted with
what she had seen by day in picture-galleries and churches.
The heavenly creations of Fra Angelico or Sandro Botticelli,
of Ghirlandaio or Raffaelle, over which she had mused and
pondered, re-produced themselves in dreams, with the intensity
and reality of actual visions, and with accessories borrowed
from all that, in her new life, had impressed itself most
vividly on her imagination. Once more she would stand in the
vast church, the censers swinging, the organ pealing overhead,
round her a great throng of beatified adoring saints, with
golden glories, with palms, and tall white lilies, and many-
coloured garments; or pillars and arches would melt away, and
she would find herself wandering through flower-enamelled
grass, in fair rose-gardens of Paradise; or radiant forms
would come gliding towards her through dark-blue skies; or the
heavens themselves would seem to open, and reveal a blaze of
glory, where, round a blue-robed, star-crowned Madonna, choirs
of rapturous angels repeated the divine melodies she had heard
faintly echoed in the violinist's dim little room. All day
long these dreams clung to her, oppressing her with their