arrangement. They were about to go forth on a ramble together--the
woods were so wild and lovely--the rocks surrounding Charlemont
were so very picturesque;--there was the quietest tarn, a sort of
basin in the bosom of the hills at a little distance, which she was
to show him; and there was the sweetest stream in the world, that
meandered in the neighborhood; and Brother Stevens so loved the
picturesque--lakes embosomed in hills, and streams stealing through
unbroken forests, and all so much the more devotedly, when he had
such a companion as Margaret Cooper.

And Margaret Cooper!--she the wild, the impassioned. A dreamer--a
muse--filled with ambitious thoughts--proud, vain, aspiring
after the vague, the unfathomable! What was her joy, now that she
could speak her whole soul, with all its passionate fullness, to
understanding ears! Stevens and herself had already spoken together.
Her books had been his books. The glowing passages which she loved
to repeat, were also the favorite passages in his memory. Over the
burning and thrilling strains of Byron, the tender and spiritual
of Shelley, the graceful and soft of Campbell, she loved to linger.
They filled her thoughts. They made her thoughts. She felt that
her true utterance lay in their language; and this language, until
now, had fallen dead and without fruit upon the dull ears of her
companions in Charlemont. What was their fiddling and festivity to
her! What their tedious recreations by hillside or stream, when she
had to depress her speech to the base levels of their unimaginative
souls! The loveliness of nature itself, unrepresented by the glowing
hues of poetry, grew tame, if not offensive; and when challenged
to its contemplation by those to whom the muse was nothing, the
fancy of the true observer grew chilled and heavy, and the scenes
of beauty seemed prostituted in their glance.