Page:Paul Clifford Vol 1.djvu/265

Rh so beautiful as in sleep! and as the light breath came from her parted lips, and the ivory lids closed over those eyes which only in sleep were silent—and her attitude in her sleep took that ineffable grace belonging solely to childhood, or the fresh youth into which childhood merges,—she was just what you might imagine a sleeping Margaret, before that most simple and gentle of all a poet's visions of womanhood had met with Faust, and ruffled her slumbers with a dream of love.

We cannot say much for Lucy's intellectual acquirements; she could, thanks to the parson's wife, spell indifferently well, and write a tolerable hand; she made preserves and sometimes riddles—it was more difficult to question the excellence of the former than to answer the queries of the latter. She worked to the admiration of all who knew her, and we beg leave to say that we deem that "an excellent thing in woman." She made caps for herself and gowns for the poor, and now and then she accomplished the more literary labour of a stray novel that had wandered down to the Manor House, or an abridgement of antient history, in which was omitted every thing