Liana always beheld her brother--the creator and ruling spirit of her
softest hours--with the heartiest joy, although he generally wanted to
get something when he came; for joy she flew to meet him, with the book
in her hand which she had been reading as her mother embroidered. She
and her mother had spent the whole day pleasantly and alone, alternately
relieving each other at embroidering and reading; as often as the
Minister travelled, they were at once free from discord and from the
visiting Charivari. With what emotion did Albano recognize the eastern
chamber, from which he had seen, for the first time, the dear maiden,
only as a blind one, standing in the distance between watery columns!
The good Liana received him more unconstrainedly than he could meet her,
after Charles's initiation into his wishes. What a paradisiacal mingling
of unaffected shyness and overflowing friendliness, stillness and fire,
of bashfulness and grace of movement, of playful kindness, of silent
consciousness! Therefore belongs to her the magnificent surname of
Virgil, the maidenly. In our days of female Jordan-almonds, academical,
strong-minded women, of hop-dances and double-quick-march steps in the
flat-shoe, the Virgilian title is not often called for. Only for ten
years (reckoning from the fourteenth) can I give it to a maiden;
afterward she becomes more manneristic. Such a graceful being is usually
at once thirteen and seventeen years old.
Why wast thou so bewitchingly unembarrassed, tender Liana! excepting
because thou, like the Bourignon, didst not once know what was to be
avoided, and because thy holy guilelessness excluded the suspicious
spying out of remote designs, the bending of the ear toward the ground
to listen for an approaching foe, and all coquettish manifestoes and
warlike preparations? Men were as yet to thee commanding fathers and
brothers; and therefore didst thou lift upon them, not yet _proudly_,
but so _affectionately_, that true pair of eyes!
And with this good-natured look, and with her smile,--whose continuance
is often, on _men's_ faces, but not on _maidens'_, the title-vignette of
falsehood,--she received our noble youth, but not him alone.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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