Aglauron. In all the idyls I ever read, they were told in caves, or beside a trickling fountain.
Laurie. That was in the last century. We will innovate. Let us begin that American originality we were talking about, and make the bank of a lake answer our purpose.
We dismounted accordingly, but, on reaching the spot, Aglauron at first insisted on lying on the grass, and gazing up at the clouds in a most uncitizen-like fashion, and it was some time before we could get the promised story. At last,—
I first saw Mrs. V—— at the opera in Vienna. Abroad, I scarcely cared for anything in comparison with music. In many respects the Old World disappointed my hopes; Society was, in essentials, no better, nor worse, than at home, and I too easily saw through the varnish of conventional refinement. Lions, seen near, were scarcely more interesting than tamer cattle, and much more annoying in their gambols and caprices. Parks and ornamental grounds pleased me less than the native forests and wide-rolling rivers of my own land. But in the Arts, and most of all in Music, I found all my wishes more than realized. I found the soul of man uttering itself with the swiftness, the freedom and the beauty, for which I had always pined. I easily conceived how foreigners, once acquainted with this diverse language, pass their lives without a wish for pleasure or employment beyond hearing the great works of the masters. It seemed to me that here was wealth to feed the thoughts for ages. This lady fixed my attention by the rapturous devotion with which she listened. I saw that she too had here found her proper home. Every shade of thought and feeling expressed in the music was mirrored in her beautiful countenance. Her rapture of attention, during some passages, was enough of itself to make you hold your breath; and a sudden stroke of genius lit her face into a very heaven with its lightning. It seemed to me that in her I should find one who would truly sympathize with me, one who looked on the art not as a connoisseur, but a votary.
I took the speediest opportunity of being introduced to her at her own house by a common friend.
But what a difference! At home I scarcely knew her. Still she was beautiful; but the sweetness, the elevated expression, which the satisfaction of an hour had given her, were entirely fled. Her eye was restless, her cheek pale and thin, her whole expression perturbed and sorrowful. Every gesture spoke the sickliness of a spirit long an outcast from its natural home, bereft of happiness, and hopeless of good.
I perceived, at first sight of her every-day face, that it was not unknown to me. Three or four years earlier, staying in the country-house of one of her friends, I had seen her picture. The house was very dull,—as dull as placid content with the mere material enjoyments of life, and an inert gentleness of nature, could make its inhabitants. They were people to be loved, but loved without a thought. Their wings had never grown, nor their eyes coveted a wider prospect than could be seen from the parent nest. The friendly visitant could not discompose them by a remark indicating any expansion of mind or life. Much as I enjoyed the beauty of the country around, when out in the free air, my hours within the house would have been dull enough but for the contemplation of this picture. While the round of common-place songs was going on, and the whist-players were at their work, I used to sit and wonder how this being, so sovereign in the fire of her nature, so proud in her untamed loveliness, could ever have come of their blood. Her eye, from the canvas, even, seemed to annihilate all things low or little, and able to command all creation in search of the object of its desires. She had not found it, though; I felt this on seeing her now. She, the queenly woman, the Boadicea of a forlorn hope, as she seemed born to be, the only woman whose face, to my eye, had ever given promise of a prodigality of nature sufficient for the entertainment of a poet's soul, was—I saw it at a glance—a captive in her life, and a beggar in her affections.
Laurie. A dangerous object to the traveller's eye, methinks!