Never had she borne the bitter breath of unkindness, nor writhed
beneath that customary injustice which punishes in others the sins of
our own temper and the varied fretfulness of caprice; and so she had
none of the fears and meannesses and acted untruths which so usually
pollute and debase the innocence of childhood. But the promise of her
ingenuous brow (over which the silken hair flowed, parted into two
streams of gold), and of the fearless but tender eyes, and of the
quiet smile which sat forever upon the rosy mouth, like Joy watching
Love, was kept in its fullest extent by the mind, from which all
thoughts, pure, kind, and guileless, flowed like waters from a well
which a spirit has made holy for its own dwelling.

On this evening we have said that she sat by her father's side and
listened, though she only in part drank in its sense, to his
conversation with his guest.

The room was of great extent and surrounded with books, over which at
close intervals the busts of the departed Great and the immortal Wise
looked down. There was the sublime beauty of Plato, the harsher and
more earthly countenance of Tully, the only Roman (except Lucretius)
who might have been a Greek. There the mute marble gave the broad
front of Bacon (itself a world), and there the features of Locke
showed how the mind wears away the links of flesh with the file of
thought. And over other departments of those works which remind us
that man is made little lower than the angels, the stern face of the
Florentine who sung of hell contrasted with the quiet grandeur
enthroned on the fair brow of the English poet,--"blind but bold,"--
and there the glorious but genial countenance of him who has found in
all humanity a friend, conspicuous among sages and minstrels, claimed