discursive are equally eloquent of the pretty general disillusion. How
they loathe and tear the mask of the sham attraction that snatched them
to the hag yoke, and fell away to show its grisly horrors within the
round of the month, if not the second enumeration of twelve by the clock!
Fleetwood had heard certain candid seniors talk, delivering their minds
in superior appreciation of unpretentious boor wenches, nature's
products, not esteemed by him. Well, of a truth, she--'Red Hair and
Rugged Brows,' as the fellow Woodseer had called her, in alternation with
'Mountain Face to Sun'--she at the unveiling was gentle, surpassingly;
graceful in the furnace of the trial. She wore through the critic ordeal
his burning sensitiveness to grace and delicacy cast about a woman, and
was rather better than not withered by it.

On the borders between maidenly and wifely, she, a thing of flesh like
other daughters of earth, had impressed her sceptical lord, inclining to
contempt of her and detestation of his bargain, as a flitting hue,
ethereal, a transfiguration of earthliness in the core of the earthly
furnace. And how?--but that it must have been the naked shining forth of
her character, startled to show itself:--'It is my husband':--it must
have been love.

The love that they versify, and strum on guitars, and go crazy over, and
end by roaring at as the delusion; this common bloom of the ripeness of a
season; this would never have utterly captured a sceptic, to vanquish him
in his mastery, snare him in her surrender. It must have been the
veritable passion: a flame kept alive by vestal ministrants in the
yewwood of the forest of Old Romance; planted only in the breasts of very
favourite maidens. Love had eyes, love had a voice that night,-love was
the explicable magic lifting terrestrial to seraphic. Though, true, she
had not Henrietta's golden smoothness of beauty. Henrietta, illumined