have breathed their power into her face; and out of them she has unconsciously woven herself a robe of supernatural grace, in which even her mortal nature seems half hidden, so that we are in doubt whether she belongs more to Heaven or to Earth.  Thus both her native virtues and the efficacies of the place seem to have crept and stolen into her unperceived, by mutual attraction and assimilation twining together in one growth, and each diffusing its life and beauty over and through the others.  It would seem indeed as if Wordsworth must have had Miranda in his eye, (or was he but working in the spirit of that Nature which she so rarely exemplifies?) when he wrote,

    “The floating clouds their state shall lend
    To her; for her the willow bend: 
       Nor shall she fail to see
    Even in the motions of the storm
    Grace that shall mould the maiden’s form
      By silent sympathy.

    The stars of midnight shall be dear
    To her; and she shall lean her ear
      In many a secret place
    Where rivulets dance their wayward round,
    And beauty born of murmuring sound
      Shall pass into her face.”

Yet, for all this, Miranda not a whit the less touches us as a creature of flesh and blood,

    “A being breathing thoughtful breath,
    A traveller between life and death.”

Nay, rather she seems all the more so, inasmuch as the character thus coheres with the circumstances, the virtues and poetries of the place being expressed in her visibly; and she would be far less real to our feelings, were not the wonders of her whereabout thus vitally incorporated with her innate and original attributes.

It is observable that Miranda does not perceive the working of her father’s art upon herself.  For, when he casts a spell of drowsiness over her, so that she cannot choose but sleep, on being awaked by him she tells him, “The strangeness of your story put heaviness in me.”  So his art conceals itself in its very potency of operation; and seems the more like nature for being preternatural.  It is another noteworthy point, that while he is telling his strange tale he thinks she is not listening attentively to his speech, partly because he is not attending to it himself, his thoughts being busy with the approaching crisis of his fortune, and drawn away to the other matters which he has in hand, and partly because in her trance of wonder at what he is relating she seems abstracted and self-withdrawn from the matter of his discourse.  His own absent-mindedness on this occasion is aptly and artfully indicated by his broken and disjointed manner of speech.  That his tongue and thought are not beating time together appears in that the latter end of his sentences keeps forgetting the beginning.