“Nature is, after all, the best teacher—would women but yield themselves to the promptings of a simple and womanly nature, they would be far more effective than they at present are. Our sex are worshippers of truth—you smile—but it is true nevertheless; and might you, dared you preserve your primitive truthfulness of heart, we should fall down and worship you.
“But I digress, and am describing Anne rather as she appeared when, like Spenser’s Amoret, she ‘reclined in the lap of womanhood,’ than while she sat upon my knee, a tender and simple child.
“I would scarcely assert that Anne was endowed with genius; and yet I know not—at any rate it was thoroughly a woman’s genius—earnest, truthful, affectionate, dependent, and yet nobly self-sustained—impassioned and yet never mistaking or perverting her emotions—embodying every quality of her sex, and yet elevating all—gay as a bird, simple as a child; her own bright nature investing all things with an ideal halo, and yet with a singular clearness of perception and soundness of judgment correcting all such illusions; a creature of contradictions, and yet grand in her consistency; a true woman; the life-study of a man, aye, and were he the wisest of his sex, he might never exhaust the sweet subject; just not an angel, but all a woman—
‘A creature not too bright nor good,
For human nature’s daily food;
For transient sorrows, simple wiles,
Praise, blame, love, kisses, tears and smiles.’
“The ship that had wrecked our own good barque was bound on a three years cruise, and all that time Anne was the only one of her sex on board. She never seemed to feel the peculiarity of her situation, all she said or did was feminine and becoming, and her little state room worthy of Goethe’s Margery, ‘it is not every maiden keeps her room so chary,’ might have been said of her.
“Never shall I forget the wild delight with which she hailed our approach to land, nor the care with which she nurtured the plants that were to relieve the monotony of the voyage—the touching gratitude with which she received the gift of a bird or animal that was to be her especial pet. And then to mark her many little expedients to preserve the order and taste of her poor garments: true, nothing could be more picturesque than her half oriental costume, the loose trowsers and robe confined by a girdle that every sailor vied in keeping tasteful. Her dark, changeful eyes and luxuriant hair might well afford to meet a skin embrowned by exposure, but rich with the brightest hue of health. The sailors called her the little queen, from her proud air, and the officers applied a thousand aristocratic epithets, all indicating a playful reverence. She was a child in heart, but a woman in manner.
“I need not recount her studies, nor that pretty reserve that made her apply to me, and to me only, for aid. Alas! I knew not the poison I thus imbibed. I dreamed not that that sweet child could ever be aught to me but a sister.