from the charm which love bestows on the beloved, there was that in
Lilian's conversation which made her a delightful companion. Whether it
was that, in this pause from the toils of my career, my mind could more
pliantly supple itself to her graceful imagination, or that her
imagination was less vague and dreamy amidst those rural scenes, which
realized in their loveliness and grandeur its long-conceived ideals, than
it had been in the petty garden-ground neighboured by the stir and hubbub
of the busy town,--in much that I had once slighted or contemned as the
vagaries of undisciplined fancy, I now recognized the sparkle and play of
an intuitive genius, lighting up many a depth obscure to instructed
thought. It is with some characters as with the subtler and more ethereal
order of poets,--to appreciate them we must suspend the course of
artificial life; in the city we call them dreamers, on the mountain-top we
find them interpreters.

In Lilian, the sympathy with Nature was not, as in Margrave, from the
joyous sense of Nature's lavish vitality; it was refined into exquisite
perception of the diviner spirit by which that vitality is informed.
Thus, like the artist, from outward forms of beauty she drew forth the
covert types, lending to things the most familiar exquisite meanings
unconceived before. For it is truly said by a wise critic of old, that
"the attribute of Art is to suggest infinitely more than it expresses;
"and such suggestions, passing from the artist's innermost thought into
the mind that receives them, open on and on into the Infinite of Ideas, as
a moonlit wave struck by a passing oar impels wave upon wave along one
track of light.

So the days glided by, and brought the eve of our bridal morn. It had
been settled that, after the ceremony (which was to be performed by
license in the village church, at no great distance, which adjoined my