THE WOMAN IN WHITE.
“In walking through a street in London, I saw a crowd of men women and children hooting and laughing at a woman, who, looking neither to the right-hand nor to the left, passed through the midst of them in perfect silence; upon approaching her, I saw that all this derision was caused by her dress, which, equally unsuited to the weather and her apparent rank in life, was from head to foot entirely white,—her bonnet, her shawl, her very shoes were white; and though all that she wore seemed of the coarsest materials, her dress was perfectly clean. As I walked past her, I looked stedfastly in her face. She was thin and pale, of a pleasing countenance, and totally unmoved by the clamour around her. I have since learnt her story:—The young man to whom she was betrothed died on the bridal-day, when she and her companions were dressed to go to church: she lost her senses,—and has ever since, to use her own words, been ‘expecting her bridegroom.’ Neither insult or privation of any kind can induce her to change the colour of her dress; she is alike insensible of her bereavement by death, or of the lapse of time,—‘she is dressed for the bridal, and the bridegroom is at hand.’”
Such is the nature of Woman’s Love—continuing in imagination, when reality is no more:
“As once I knew a crazy Moorish maid,
Who dressed her in her buried lover’s clothes,
And o’er the smooth spring in the mountain’s cleft
Hung with her lute, and played the selfsame tune
He used to play, and listened to the shadow
Herself had made.”—Coleridge.
Such is the tenderness, such the intensity of the love of innocence. It has for ever existed, and will for ever exist,—from Eve, on the first day of her creation, to the many whose hearts at this moment beat with affection and love:
“All thoughts, all passions, all desires,
Whatever stirs this mortal frame,
All are but ministers of Love,
And feed his sacred flame.”