head. For happiness is not merely to be at rest. It is to be with God, to carry out to the full His wish that His children should appreciate and enjoy the powers and good things given them by His hands. And when that happiness is based on love—and there is no true happiness on aught that is not high—the love itself is of the soul and quivers with the flapping of its wings. Then indeed can we realize that marvellous promise of the words of the Master:
"Blessed are the pure in heart for they shall see God." Wordsworth and those who held with him saw God and worshipped Him in those myriad beauties of the lake they loved; and as the beauty and its immortal truth soothed and purified their souls, so was the spirit of the love-sick girl cleansed of all dross. How at such a time, when the soul swam free in grateful worship, was there place for anything that was not clean? Her father thought, as he looked at her and heard the ring of her voice, that he had never seen her look better or happier. She was full of spirits, gay, sweet, tender; and yet there was over her such a grace of gentle gravity that the old man felt himself saying to himself:
"My little girl is a woman!"
That mellow afternoon was to her lovely; the trees and shrubs, the flowers, the fields. The singing of the birds was ethereal music; the lights and shadows were the personal manisfestation of Nature's God. Her heart, her sympathy, her nature were at full tide; all overflowing and in their plenitude full.
The long summer afternoon faded into the softness of twilight during the homeward journey. Perhaps it was the yielding to its mysterious influence which made Joy so still; perhaps it was that she was drawing nearer to the man whom she adored. Her father neither knew nor took note of it. He saw that his little girl was silent in an ecstasy of happiness in that soft twilight of which she had spoken so tenderly; and he was content. He too sat silent, yielding himself to the influence of the beauty around him.
