It was winter weather, frosty and clear and bright, and I
was tempted out a great deal, taking long rides, begun before sunset
and ending by moonlight, and generally alone. And always when the
world seemed most beautiful I thought of Ideala, and how she had loved
its beauty-- mountain and plain, flood and field, forest and flower,
the snow and the sunshine, and all the alternations of light and
shade; the wonders of form, and the depth and harmony of colour; the
blue sky by day, with its glories of sunrise and sunset; the dark sky
by night, with its moonlight and starlight--the sky always! that
cloudland to which, when we are wearied by the more monotonous earth,
we had only to lift our eyes and there the scene is changing for
ever--the sky--and the sea:
In all its vague immensity!
Would she ever see it again in the old way? When she left us one might
have said of her mental state:
O dark, dark, dark, amid the blaze of noon--
Irrecoverably dark, total eclipse
Without all hope of day!
And where was she now? and was she learning to see again? I own I
sometimes had the presumption to think that if she had stayed with us I
might have helped her.
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