the "child of light"--a creature so tremulously sensitive to all beauty,
brightness, and joy, that it seems as if she could not co-exist with
darkness and sorrow. But even then we have intimated to us that vital
quality in her nature which makes all self-sacrifice possible; and which
assures us that, whenever her life-choice shall come to lie between
enjoyment and right, she shall choose the higher though the harder path.
For her joy is essentially the joy of sympathy; mere self has no place in
it. In her exquisite justification of the Placa scene to Don Silva, she
herself defines it in one line better than all words of ours can do--

"_I_ was not, but joy was, and love and triumph."

She is but a form and presence in which the joy, not merely of the fair
sunset scene, but primarily and emphatically of the human hearts around
her, enshrines itself. It has no free life in herself apart from others;
it must inevitably die if shut out from this tremulousness of human
sympathy. And we know it shall give place to a sorrow correspondingly
sensitive, intense, and absorbing, whenever the young bright spirit is
brought face to face with human sorrow. Even while we gaze on her as the
embodied joy, and love, and triumph of the scene, the shadow begins to
fall. The band of Gypsy prisoners passes by, and her eyes meet those
eyes whose gaze, not to be so read by any nature lower and more
superficial than hers--

"Seemed to say he bore
The pain of those who never could be saved."

Joy collapses at once within her; the light fades away from the scene;
the very sunset glory becomes dull and cold. We are shown from the first
that no life can satisfy this "child of light" which shall not be a life