It was an essence or divinity, shrined and shrouded in herself, which
gave her more intimate and vital union with all the influences of the
universe, a companion to her loneliness, an angel hymning low to her own
listening soul. This made her enjoyment of Nature, in its merest
trifles, exquisite and profound; this gave to her tenderness of heart all
the delicious and sportive variety love borrows from imagination; this
lifted her piety above the mere forms of conventional religion, and
breathed into her prayers the ecstasy of the saint.

But Helen was not the less filled with the sweet humanities of her age
and sex; her very gravity was tinged with rosy light, as a western cloud
with the sun. She had sportiveness and caprice, and even whim, as the
butterfly, though the emblem of the soul, still flutters wantonly over
every wild-flower, and expands its glowing wings on the sides of the
beaten road. And with a sense of weakness in the common world (growing
out of her very strength in nobler atmospheres), she leaned the more
trustfully on the strong arm of her young adorer, not fancying that the
difference between them arose from superiority in her; but rather as a
bird, once tamed, flies at the sight of the hawk to the breast of its
owner, so from each airy flight into the loftier heaven, let but the
thought of danger daunt her wing, and, as in a more powerful nature, she
took refuge on that fostering heart.

The love between these children--for so, if not literally in years, in
their newness to all that steals the freshness and the dew from maturer
life they may be rightly called--was such as befitted those whose souls
have not forfeited the Eden. It was more like the love of fairies than
of human beings. They showed it to each other innocently and frankly;
yet of love as we of the grosser creation call it, with its impatient
pains and burning hopes, they never spoke nor dreamed. It was an