the country-girl, unused to works of that nature, often
became deeply absorbed -- interested her strange audi-
tor very little, or not at all. Pictures of life, scenes of
passion or sentiment, wit, humor, and pathos, were all
thrown away, or worse than thrown away, on Clifford;
either because he lacked an experience by which to test
their truth, or because his own griefs were a touchstone
of reality that few feigned emotions could withstand.
When Phœbe broke into a peal of merry laughter at what
she read, he would now and then laugh for sympathy, but
oftener respond with a troubled, questioning look. If a
tear -- a maiden's sunshiny tear over imaginary woe --
dropped upon some melancholy page, Clifford either took
it as a token of actual calamity, or else grew peevish, and
angrily motioned her to close the volume. And wisely
too! Is not the world sad enough, in genuine earnest,
without making a pastime of mock-sorrows?

With poetry it was rather better. He delighted in the
swell and subsidence of the rhythm, and the happily re-
curring rhyme. Nor was Clifford incapable of feeling the
sentiment of poetry, -- not, perhaps, where it was highest
or deepest, but where it was most flitting and ethereal.
It was impossible to foretell in what exquisite verse the
awakening spell might lurk; but, on raising her eyes from
the page to Clifford's face, Phœbe would be made aware,
by the light breaking through it, that a more delicate intel-
iigence than her own had caught a lambent flame from
what she read. One glow of this kind, however, was often
the precursor of gloom for many hours afterward; because,
when the glow left him, he seemed conscious of a missing
sense and power, and groped about for them, as if a blind
man should go seeking his lost eyesight.

-163-