"This lovely show," I said, "is the result of a busy fancy. This white
world is the creation of a poet such as Shelley, in whom the fancy was too
much for the intellect. Fancy settles upon anything; half destroys its
form, half beautifies it with something that is not its own. But the true
creative imagination, the form-seer, and the form-bestower, falls like the
rain in the spring night, vanishing amid the roots of the trees; not
settling upon them in clouds of wintry white, but breaking forth from them
in clouds of summer green."
And then my thoughts very naturally went from Nature to my niece; and I
asked myself whether within the last few days I had not seen upon her
countenance the expression of a mental spring-time. For the mind has its
seasons four, with many changes, as well as the world, only that the
cycles are generally longer: they can hardly be more mingled than as here
in our climate.
Let me confess, now that the subject of the confession no longer exists,
that there had been something about Adela that, pet-child of mine as she
was, had troubled me.
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