Itself against a stone. I wept, until my spectacles were dimmed for

that hopeless sorrow; but there was a pang beyond tears for those icy

statues.

"Still a boy, I was thus too much a man in knowledge,--I did not

comprehend the sights I was compelled to see. I used to tear my

glasses away from my eyes, and, frightened at myself, run to escape my

own consciousness. Reaching the small house where we then lived, I

plunged into my grandmother's room and, throwing myself upon the

floor, buried my face in her lap; and sobbed myself to sleep with

premature grief. But when I awakened, and felt her cool hand upon my

hot forehead, and heard the low, sweet song, or the gentle story, or

the tenderly told parable from the Bible, with which she tried to

soothe me, I could not resist the mystic fascination that lured me, as

I lay in her lap, to steal a glance at her through the spectacles.

"Pictures of the Madonna have not her rare and pensive beauty. Upon

the tranquil little islands her life had been eventless, and all the

fine possibilities of her nature were like flowers that never bloomed.

Placid were all her years; yet I have read of no heroine, of no woman

great in sudden crises, that it did not seem to me she might have

been. The wife and widow of a man who loved his own home better than

the homes of others, I have yet heard of no queen, no belle, no

imperial beauty, whom in grace, and brilliancy, and persuasive

courtesy, she might not have surpassed.

"Madam," said Titbottom to my wife, whose heart hung upon his story;

"your husband's young friend, Aurelia, wears sometimes a camelia in

her hair, and no diamond in the ball-room seems so costly as that

perfect flower, which women envy, and for whose least and withered

petal men sigh; yet, in the tropical solitudes of Brazil, how many a

camelia bud drops from a bush that no eye has ever seen, which, had it

flowered and been noticed, would have gilded all hearts with its

memory.

"When I stole these furtive glances at my grandmother, half fearing

that they were wrong, I saw only a calm lake, whose shores were low,

and over which the sky hung unbroken, so that the least star was

clearly reflected. It had an atmosphere of solemn twilight

tranquillity, and so completely did its unruffled surface blend with

the cloudless, star-studded sky, that, when I looked through my

spectacles at my grandmother, the vision seemed to me all heaven and

stars. Yet, as I gazed and gazed, I felt what stately cities might

well have been built upon those shores, and have flashed prosperity

over the calm, like coruscations of pearls.

"I dreamed of gorgeous fleets, silken sailed and blown by perfumed

winds, drifting over those depthless waters and through those spacious

skies. I gazed upon the twilight, the inscrutable silence, like a

God-fearing discoverer upon a new, and vast, and dim sea, bursting

upon him through forest glooms, and in the fervor of whose impassioned

gaze, a millennial and poetic world arises, and man need no longer die

to be happy.

"My companions naturally deserted me, for I had grown wearily grave

and abstracted: and, unable to resist the allurement of my spectacles,