and heavy drowsiness of warm churches, filled with the droning
echoes of a voice preaching incomprehensible things;--the
progressively augmenting weariness of lessons in deportment, in
dancing, in music, in the impossible art of keeping her dresses
unruffled and unsoiled. Perhaps she never had any reason to
regret all these.

She went to sleep and awakened with the wild birds;--her life
remained as unfettered by formalities as her fine feet by shoes.
Excepting Carmen's old prayer-book,--in which she learned to read
a little,--her childhood passed without books,--also without
pictures, without dainties, without music, without theatrical
amusements. But she saw and heard and felt much of that which,
though old as the heavens and the earth, is yet eternally new and
eternally young with the holiness of beauty,--eternally mystical
and divine,---eternally weird: the unveiled magnificence of
Nature's moods,--the perpetual poem hymned by wind and
surge,--the everlasting splendor of the sky.

She saw the quivering pinkness of waters curled by the breath of
the morning--under the deepening of the dawn--like a far
fluttering and scattering of rose-leaves of fire;--

Saw the shoreless, cloudless, marvellous double-circling azure of
perfect summer days--twin glories of infinite deeps inter.
reflected, while the Soul of the World lay still, suffused with a
jewel-light, as of vaporized sapphire;--

Saw the Sea shift color,--"change sheets,"--when the viewless
Wizard of the Wind breathed upon its face, and made it green;--