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My Novel — Volume 09 by Baron Edward Bulwer Lytton Lytton
page 45 of 108 (41%)
companionship, tender friendship, the relief and the sunlight of woman's
smile, hereafter the voices of children,--music that, striking on the
hearts of both parents, wakens the most lasting and the purest of all
sympathies,--these are my hope. Is the hope so mean, my fond mother?"

Again the countess wept, and her tears were not dried when she left the
room.




CHAPTER VIII.

Oh, Helen, fair Helen,--type of the quiet, serene, unnoticed, deep-felt
excellence of woman! Woman, less as the ideal that a poet conjures from
the air, than as the companion of a poet on the earth! Woman, who, with
her clear sunny vision of things actual, and the exquisite fibre of her
delicate sense, supplies the deficiencies of him whose foot stumbles on
the soil, because his eye is too intent upon the stars! Woman, the
provident, the comforting, angel whose pinions are folded round the
heart, guarding there a divine spring unmarred by the winter of the
world! Helen, soft Helen, is it indeed in thee that the wild and
brilliant "lord of wantonness and ease" is to find the regeneration of
his life, the rebaptism of his soul? Of what avail thy meek prudent
household virtues to one whom Fortune screens from rough trial; whose
sorrows lie remote from thy ken; whose spirit, erratic and perturbed, now
rising, now falling, needs a vision more subtle than thine to pursue, and
a strength that can sustain the reason, when it droops, on the wings of
enthusiasm and passion?

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