“Oh! yes, I love them—I love them dearly, father. I would do any thing for any one of them; I would give up any thing I have got to make them happy. Oh yes, I love Anna Harlande, and Rose Merrivale, and Mary Mitford, dearly, but—but—”
“But you love not their company, you would say, would you not, my child?”
“That is not what I was about to say; but I know not how it is, their merriment is so loud, and their glee so very joyous, that it seems to me that I cannot sympathize with them in their joy, as I can in their sorrow; and they view things with eyes so different from mine, and laugh at thoughts that go nigh to make me weep, and see or feel so little of the loveliness of Nature, and care so little for what I care most of all, soft, sad poetry, or heart-stirring romance, or inspired music, that when I am among them, I do almost long to be away from them all, in the calm of this pleasant chamber, or in the fragrance of my bower beside the stream. And I do feel my spirit jangled and perplexed by their light-hearted, thoughtless mirth, as one feels at hearing a false note struck in the midst of a sweet symphony. What is this? what means this, my father?”
“It is a gift, Theresa,” replied the old man, half mournfully. “It means that you are endowed rarely, by God himself, with powers the most unusual, the most wondrous, the most beautiful, most high and godlike of any which are allowed to mortals. I have seen this long, long ago—I have mused over it; hoped, prayed, that it might not be so; nay, striven to repress the germs of it in your young spirit, yet never have I spoken of it until now; for I knew not that you were conscious, and would not be he that should awaken you to the consciousness of the grand but perilous possession which you hold, delegated to you direct from Omnipotence.”
He paused, and she gazed at him with lips apart, and eyes wide in wonder. The color died away in a sort of mysterious awe from her warm cheek. The blood rushed tumultuously to her heart. She listened breathless and amazed. Never had she heard him speak thus, never imagined that he felt thus, before—yet now that she did hear, she felt as though she were but listening again to that which she had heard many times before; and though she understood not his words altogether, they had struck a kindred chord in her inmost soul, and while its vibration was almost too much for her powers of endurance, it yet told her that his words were true.
She could not for her life have bid him go on, but for worlds she would not have failed to hear him out.
He watched the changed expression of her features, and half struck with a feeling of self-reproach that he should have created doubts, perhaps fears, in that ingenuous soul, smiled on her kindly, and asked in a confident tone—
“You have felt this already, have you not, my child?”
“Not as you put it to me, father; no, I have never dreamed or hoped that I had any such particular gift of God, such glorious and preëminent possession as this of which you speak. I may, indeed, have fancied at times that there was something within me, in which I differed from others around me—something which made me feel more joy, deeper, and fuller, and more soul-fraught joy, than they feel; and sorrow, softer, and moved more easily, if not more piercing or more permanent—which made me love the world, and its inhabitants, and above all its Maker, with a far different love from theirs—something which evermore seems struggling within me, as if it would forth and find tongue, but cannot. But now, that you have spoken, I know that it indeed must be as you say, and that this unknown something is a gift, is a possession from on high. What is this thing, my father?”
“My child, this thing is genius,” replied the old man solemnly.