at any moment, and eye, where; while still there was the indefinable
something added, or taken away, which makes all the difference between
sordid life and an earthly paradise. The feeling and sympathy in all of
them were deep and true. There was the scene, that comes once in every
life, of the lover winning the soft and pure avowal of bashful affection
from the maiden whose slender form half leans towards his arm, half
shrinks from it, we know not which. There was wedded affection in its
successive stages, represented in a series of delicately conceived
designs, touched with a holy fire, that burned from youth to age in
those two hearts, and gave one identical beauty to the faces throughout
all the changes of feature.

There was a drawing of an infant's shoe, half worn out, with the airy
print of the blessed foot within; a thing that would make a mother smile
or weep out of the very depths of her heart; and yet an actual mother
would not have been likely to appreciate the poetry of the little shoe,
until Miriam revealed it to her. It was wonderful, the depth and force
with which the above, and other kindred subjects, were depicted, and the
profound significance which they often acquired. The artist, still in
her fresh youth, could not probably have drawn any of these dear and
rich experiences from her own life; unless, perchance, that first sketch
of all, the avowal of maiden affection, were a remembered incident, and
not a prophecy. But it is more delightful to believe that, from first to
last, they were the productions of a beautiful imagination, dealing with
the warm and pure suggestions of a woman's heart, and thus idealizing
a truer and lovelier picture of the life that belongs to woman, than
an actual acquaintance with some of its hard and dusty facts could have
inspired. So considered, the sketches intimated such a force and variety
of imaginative sympathies as would enable Miriam to fill her life richly
with the bliss and suffering of womanhood, however barren it might