How artificial had been the delights with which she soothed herself! Here, all the time, was the reality; here in this poor home, brooded over by the curse of poverty, whence should come shame and woe and death.

What to her now were the elegance of art, the loveliness of nature?
Beauty had been touched by mortality, and its hues were of the corpse, of the grave.

Would the music of a verse ever again fill her with rapture?
How meaningless were all such toys of thought to one whose path lay through the valley of desolation! Thus did Emily think and feel in this sombre season, the passionate force of her imagination making itself the law of life and the arbiter of her destiny.

She could not take counsel with time; her temperament knew nothing of that compromise with ardours and impulses which is the wisdom of disillusion.

Circumstances willed that she should suffer by the nobleness of her instincts those endowments which might in a happier lot have exalted her to such perfection of calm joy as humanity may attain, were fated to be the source of misery inconceivable by natures less finely cast..