visit her father's house, and I asked Faber, in taking her there, to seize
the occasion to see Lilian, that he might communicate to me his impression
of a case so peculiar. I prepared Mrs. Ashleigh for this visit by a
previous note. When the old man and the child came back, both brought me
comfort. Amy was charmed with Lilian, who had received her with the
sweetness natural to her real character, and I loved to hear Lilian's
praise from those innocent lips.

Faber's report was still more calculated to console me.

"I have seen, I have conversed with her long and familiarly. You were
quite right,--there is no tendency to consumption in that exquisite, if
delicate, organization; nor do I see cause for the fear to which your
statement had pre-inclined me. That head is too nobly formed for any
constitutional cerebral infirmity. In its organization, ideality, wonder,
veneration, are large, it is true, but they are balanced by other organs,
now perhaps almost dormant, but which will come into play as life passes
from romance into duty. Something at this moment evidently oppresses her
mind. In conversing with her, I observe abstraction, listlessness; but I
am so convinced of her truthfulness, that if she has once told you she
returned your affection, and pledged to you her faith, I should, in your
place, rest perfectly satisfied that whatever be the cloud that now rests
on her imagination, and for the time obscures the idea of yourself, it
will pass away."

Faber was a believer in the main divisions of phrenology, though he did
not accept all the dogmas of Gall and Spurzheim; while, to my mind, the
refutation of phrenology in its fundamental propositions had been
triumphantly established by the lucid arguments of Sir W. Hamilton.[1]
But when Faber rested on phrenological observations assurances in honour