allow her to entertain or to comprehend any service equally fervid of
passion or of impassioned action. She, however, was good, affectionate,
and worthy to be trusted. But a third there was, a nursery maid, and
therefore more naturally and more immediately standing within the
confidence of her mistress--her I could not trust: her I suspected. But
of that hereafter. Meantime, Hannah, she upon whom I leaned as upon a
staff in all which respected her mistress, ran up stairs, after I had
spoken and received her answer, in order hastily to dress and prepare
herself for going out along with me to the city. I did not ask her to
be quick in her movements: I knew there was no need: and, whilst she
was absent, I took up, in one of my fretful movements of nervousness, a
book which was lying upon a side-table: the book fell open of itself at
a particular page; and in that, perhaps, there was nothing
extraordinary, for it was a little portable edition of _Paradise
Lost_; and the page was one which I must naturally have turned to
many a time: for to Agnes I had read all the great masters of
literature, especially those of modern times; so that few people knew
the high classics more familiarly: and as to the passage in question,
from its divine beauty I had read it aloud to her, perhaps, on fifty
separate occasions. All this I mention to take away any appearance of a
vulgar attempt to create omens; but still, in the very act of
confessing the simple truth, and thus weakening the marvellous
character of the anecdote, I must notice it as a strange instance of
the '_Sortes Miltonianae_,'--that precisely at such a moment as
this I should find thrown in my way, should feel tempted to take up,
and should open, a volume containing such a passage as the following:
and observe, moreover, that although the volume, _once being taken
up_, would naturally open where it had been most frequently read,
there were, however, many passages which had been read _as_
frequently--or more so. The particular passage upon which I opened at