Page:William Jerdan.pdf/4

Rh most painful that can be conceived, and exciting emotions of unutterable grief.

I found in L. E. L. a creature of another sphere, though with every fascination which could render her most loveable in our every-day world. The exquisite simplicity of childhood, the fine form of womanhood, the sweetest of dispositions, the utmost charm of unaffected manners, and, above all, an impassioned ideal and poetical temperament which absorbed her existence and held all else comparatively as nothing. The development of this Psyche-phenomenon was her life, and all that pertained to it. Her whole history realised the allegory, if it be an allegory, of Apuleius, as closely as if it had been invented to shape her course, with the exception of its fatal termination on earth—death instead of slumber; but let us hope only a different mode of raising her to that heaven where her prototype entered into the glories of immortality and the unalloyed raptures which are sought in vain in mortal communion.

so sung she to me; and it but weakly expressed the idolisation which the constant watch over the expansion of that extraordinary and yet most natural Intelligence inspired. From day to day and hour to hour, it was mine to facilitate her studies, to shape her objects, to regulate her taste, to direct her genius, and cultivate the divine organisation of her being. For the divine part was in Her! She was the Myth of the Grecian tale; and unless it can be comprehended that there are two almost distinct yet inseparably united faculties to be traced in human nature—the one celestial and the other terrestrial—I must confess it to be impossible for me by any description to convey an accurate