in the fullest and deepest unison to which circumstances shall call her
with the life of humanity. That true greatness of our humanity is
already active within her, which makes it impossible she should live or
die to herself alone. Her destiny is already marked out by a force of
which circumstance may determine the special manifestation, but which no
force of circumstance can turn aside from its course; the force of a
living spiritual power within herself which constrains that she shall be
faithful to the highest good which life shall place before her.

We would fain linger for a little over the scenes which follow between
her and Don Silva; portraying as they do a love so intense in its virgin
tenderness, and so spiritually pure and high. It is the same "child of
light" that comes before us here; the same tremulous living in the light
and joy of her love, but also the same impossibility of living even in
its light and joy apart from those of her beloved. And not from his
only: that passion which in more ordinary natures so almost inevitably
contracts the sphere of the sympathies, in Fedalma expands and enlarges
it. Amid all the intoxicating sweetness of her bright young joys, the
loving heart turns again and again to the thought of human sorrow and
wrong; and among all the hopes that gladden her future, one is never
absent from her thoughts--"Oh! I shall have much power as well as joy;"
power to redress the wrong and to assuage the suffering. Half playfully,
half seriously, she asks the question--

"But is it _what_ we love, or _how_ we love,
That makes true good?"

Most seriously and solemnly is the question answered through her after-
life. To love less wholly, purely, unselfishly--yet still holding the
outward claims of that love subordinate to a possible still higher and