“Love!” said he, “what is that? I never thought of it before.” The portrait hung near to an open door, through which the soft air of spring was bearing the enchanting odour of a bed of violets which grew in the garden: above was the rich softness of the blue sky. As he sat amid influences so soothing, and gazed upon the overpowering beauty of those splendid features, on which a hazy sunlight coming through a window in the roof, threw a more peculiar lustre there arose within the stern, constrained, and wholly intellectual being of this earnest, scheming man, the slow but strong movement of a passion which he never before had known. The rigid stress of mind, so long kept up—the high-wound force of feeling, so necessary, yet so painful—softened and melted away in the delicious mildness of sentiment that flowed in upon his nature. It wrestled, did that sentiment, with the cold hardness of that logical frame of being, as the still growing wind with the outer barriers of a thick forest, and gradually burst in and wandered where it pleased. The disdainful solitude of soul in which he had fortified himself against a hostile world, was changing into a spirit which fraternized with all the universe. It was the birth of sympathy within a bosom before entirely and fiercely personal. “Where has it kept so long?—this soft, this delicate emotion?” said he. As the blue zephyr, born amidst the depths of the sky, raises and opens out the dried, mast-bound sail of some long-locked bark, and floats away the vessel into seas of unknown loveliness, so did this delicious sentiment expand and quicken that spirituality which had before lain senseless and collapsed. It diffused a joy and beauty like that of the golden sunshine gleaming into a clouded forest, flowing and flashing with an ever brightening splendor, rolling a yellow flowerage over the mind, vesting the trees in airy robes of silver, and spreading through the teeming woods a mysterious troop of shadows, the dusky-haired daughters of light. Like the refreshing rain upon the fevered earth, there fell upon his spirit a fragrant shower of soft hopes and immortal dreams. The rough and hardened bough was become a branch of leaves and fruits. He who had dwelt ever in the outwardness of thought, first entered the portals of the inner world of feeling: he who had been ever passionate only to DO, recognized a state in which to BE was bliss, to move was ecstacy.