second-rate writers were full of conceits and vagaries, the feelings are
very indifferent to the mere intellectual forms around which the same
feelings in others have gathered, if only by their means they hint at,
and sometimes express themselves. Now I understood this old fantastic
verse, and knew that the foam-bells on the torrent of passionate feeling
are iris-hued. And what was more--it proved an intellectual nexus
between my love and my studies, or at least a bridge by which I could
pass from the one to the other.

That same day, I remember well, Mrs. Wilson told me that Lady Alice was
much better. But as days passed, and still she did not make her
appearance, my anxiety only changed its object, and I feared that it was
from aversion to me that she did not join the family. But her name was
never mentioned in my hearing by any of the other members of it; and her
absence appeared to be to them a matter of no moment or interest.

One night, as I sat in my room, I found, as usual, that it was
impossible to read; and throwing the book aside, relapsed into that
sphere of thought which now filled my soul, and had for its centre the
Lady Alice. I recalled her form as she lay on the couch, and brooded
over the remembrance till a longing to see her, almost unbearable, arose
within me.

"Would to heaven," I said to myself, "that will were power!"

In this concurrence of idleness, distraction, and vehement desire, I
found all at once, without any foregone resolution, that I was
concentrating and intensifying within me, until it rose almost to a
command, the operative volition that Lady Alice should come to me. In a
moment more I trembled at the sense of a new power which sprang into