--Such was the Book of the Maiden Sisters.You will believe me more readily now when I tell you that I found the soul of Iris in the one that lay open before me.Sometimes it was a poem that held it, sometimes a drawing, angel, arabesque, caricature, or a mere hieroglyphic symbol of which I could make nothing.A rag of cloud on one page, as I remember, with a streak of red zigzagging out of it across the paper as naturally as a crack runs through a China bowl.On the next page a dead bird,--some little favorite, Isuppose; for it was worked out with a special love, and I saw on the leaf that sign with which once or twice in my life I have had a letter sealed,--a round spot where the paper is slightly corrugated, and, if there is writing there, the letters are somewhat faint and blurred.Most of the pages were surrounded with emblematic traceries.It was strange to me at first to see how often she introduced those homelier wild-flowers which we call weeds,--for it seemed there was none of them too humble for her to love, and none too little cared for by Nature to be without its beauty for her artist eye and pencil.By the side of the garden-flowers,--of Spring's curled darlings, the hyacinths, of rosebuds, dear to sketching maidens, of flower-de-luces and morning-glories, nay, oftener than these, and more tenderly caressed by the colored brush that rendered them,--were those common growths which fling themselves to be crushed under our feet and our wheels, making themselves so cheap in this perpetual martyrdom that we forget each of them is a ray of the Divine beauty.
Yellow japanned buttercups and star-disked dandelions,--just as we see them lying in the grass, like sparks that have leaped from the kindling sun of summer; the profuse daisy-like flower which whitens the fields, to the great disgust of liberal shepherds, yet seems fair to loving eyes, with its button-like mound of gold set round with milk-white rays; the tall-stemmed succory, setting its pale blue flowers aflame, one after another, sparingly, as the lights are kindled in the candelabra of decaying palaces where the heirs of dethroned monarchs are dying out; the red and white clovers, the broad, flat leaves of the plantain,--"the white man's foot," as the Indians called it,--the wiry, jointed stems of that iron creeping plant which we call "knot-grass," and which loves its life so dearly that it is next to impossible to murder it with a hoe, as it clings to the cracks of the pavement;--all these plants, and many more, she wove into her fanciful garlands and borders.--On one of the pages were some musical notes.I touched them from curiosity on a piano belonging to one of our boarders.Strange! There are passages that I have heard before, plaintive, full of some hidden meaning, as if they were gasping for words to interpret them.She must have heard the strains that have so excited my curiosity, coming from my neighbor's chamber.The illuminated border she had traced round the page that held these notes took the place of the words they seemed to be aching for.Above, a long monotonous sweep of waves, leaden-hued, anxious and jaded and sullen, if you can imagine such an expression in water.On one side an Alpine needle, as it were, of black basalt, girdled with snow.On the other a threaded waterfall.
The red morning-tint that shone in the drops had a strange look,--one would say the cliff was bleeding;--perhaps she did not mean it.
Below, a stretch of sand, and a solitary bird of prey, with his wings spread over some unseen object.--And on the very next page a procession wound along, after the fashion of that on the title-page of Fuller's "Holy War," in which I recognized without difficulty every boarder at our table in all the glory of the most resplendent caricature--three only excepted,--the Little Gentleman, myself, and one other.
I confess I did expect to see something that would remind me of the girl's little deformed neighbor, if not portraits of him.--There is a left arm again, though;--no,--that is from the "Fighting Gladiator,"the "Jeune Heros combattant" of the Louvre;--there is the broad ring of the shield.From a cast, doubtless.[The separate casts of the "Gladiator's" arm look immense; but in its place the limb looks light, almost slender,--such is the perfection of that miraculous marble.I never felt as if I touched the life of the old Greeks until I looked on that statue.]--Here is something very odd, to be sure.An Eden of all the humped and crooked creatures! What could have been in her head when she worked out such a fantasy? She has contrived to give them all beauty or dignity or melancholy grace.A Bactrian camel lying under a palm.A dromedary flashing up the sands,--spray of the dry ocean sailed by the "ship of the desert." A herd of buffaloes, uncouth, shaggy-maned, heavy in the forehand, light in the hind-quarter.[The buffalo is the lion of the ruminants.] And there is a Norman horse, with his huge, rough collar, echoing, as it were, the natural form of the other beast.
And here are twisted serpents; and stately swans, with answering curves in their bowed necks, as if they had snake's blood under their white feathers; and grave, high-shouldered herons standing on one foot like cripples, and looking at life round them with the cold stare of monumental effigies.--A very odd page indeed! Not a creature in it without a curve or a twist, and not one of them a mean figure to look at.You can make your own comment; I am fanciful, you know.I believe she is trying to idealize what we vulgarly call deformity, which she strives to look at in the light of one of Nature's eccentric curves, belonging to her system of beauty, as the hyperbola, and parabola belong to the conic sections, though we cannot see them as symmetrical and entire figures, like the circle and ellipse.At any rate, I cannot help referring this paradise of twisted spines to some idea floating in her head connected with her friend whom Nature has warped in the moulding.