It has been said that every clever person is, to a certain degree, mad. By which it is to be understood, that every person whose mind soars above the vulgar, has some exalted and disinterested object in view to which they are ready to sacrifice the common blessings of life. Thus, from the moment that Elizabeth had brought Falkner to consent to her accompanying him to Greece, she had devoted herself to the task, first, of saving his life, if it should be in danger; and, secondly, of reconciling him in the end to prolonged existence. There were many difficulties which presented themselves, since she was unaware of the circumstances that drove him to seek death as a remedy and an atonement; nor had she any desire to pry into her benefactor's secrets: in her own heart, she suspected an overstrained delicacy or generosity of feeling, which exaggerated error, and gave the sting to remorse. But whatever was the occasion of his sufferings, she dedicated herself to their relief; and resolved to educate herself so as to fulfil the task of reconciling him to life, to the best of her ability.
Left at Zante, while he proceeded to join the patriot bands of Greece, she boarded in the house of a respectable family, but lived in the most retired manner possible. Her chief time was spent in study. She read to store her mind--to confirm its fortitude--to elevate its tone. She read, also, to acquire such precepts of philosophy and religion as might best apply to her peculiar task, and to learn those secrets of life and death which Falkner's desire to die had brought so home to her juvenile imagination.
If a time is to be named when the human heart is nearest moral perfection, most alive, and yet most innocent, aspiring to good, without a knowledge of evil, the period at which Elizabeth had arrived--from thirteen to sixteen--is it. Vague forebodings are awakened; a sense of the opening drama of life, unaccompanied with any longing to enter on it--that feeling is reserved for the years that follow; but at fourteen and fifteen we only feel that we are emerging from childhood, and we rejoice, having yet a sense that as yet it is not fitting that we should make one of the real actors on the world's stage. A dreamy, delicious period, when all is unknown; and yet we feel that all is soon to be unveiled. The first pang has not been felt; for we consider childhood's woes (real and frightful as those sometimes are) as puerile, and no longer belonging to us. We look upon the menaced evils of life as a fiction. How can care touch the soul which places its desires beyond low-minded thought? Ingratitude, deceit, treason--these have not yet engendered distrust of others, nor have our own weaknesses and errors planted the thorn of self-disapprobation and regret. Solitude is no evil, for the thoughts are rife with busy visions; and the shadows that flit around and people our reveries have almost the substance and vitality of the actual world.