revellers. The night was now clear. Stars were low over the ridge of
pines, dropped to a league of our strange world to record the doings.
Beneath this roof lay the starry She. He was elected to lie beneath it
also: and he beheld his heavenly lady floating on the lull of soft white
cloud among her sister spheres. After the way of imaginative young men,
he had her features more accurately now she was hidden, and he idealized
her more. He could escape for a time from his coil of similes and paint
for himself the irids of her large, long, grey eyes darkly rimmed; purest
water-grey, lucid within the ring, beneath an arch of lashes. He had
them fast; but then he fell to contemplating their exceeding rareness;
And the mystery of the divinely grey swung a kindled fancy to the flight
with some queen-witch of woods, of whom a youth may dream under the spell
of twilights, East or West, among forest branches.

She had these marvellous eyes and the glamour for men. She had not yet
met a man with the poetical twist in the brain to prize her elementally.
All admitted the glamour; none of her courtiers were able to name it,
even the poetical head giving it a name did not think of the witch in her
looks as a witch in her deeds, a modern daughter of the mediaeval. To
her giant squire the eyes of the lady were queer: they were unlit glass
lamps to her French suppliant; and to the others, they were attractively
uncommon; the charm for them being in her fine outlines, her stature,
carriage of her person, and unalterable composure; particularly her
latent daring. She had the effect on the general mind of a lofty crag-
castle with a history. There was a whiff of gunpowder exciting the
atmosphere in the anecdotal part of the history known.

Woodseer sat for a certain time over his note-book. He closed it with a
thrilling conceit of the right thing written down; such as entomologists
feel when they have pinned the rare insect. But what is butterfly or