I have met with no traces of the Virgin during the years between her
Presentation in the Temple and her becoming head girl at Temple
College. These years, we may be assured, can hardly have been other
than eventful; but incidents, or bits of life, are like living
forms--it is only here and here, as by rare chance, that one of them
gets arrested and fossilised; the greater number disappear like the
greater number of antediluvian molluscs, and no one can say why one
of these flies, as it were, of life should get preserved in amber
more than another. Talk, indeed, about luck and cunning; what a
grain of sand as against a hundredweight is cunning's share here as
against luck's. What moment could be more humdrum and unworthy of
special record than the one chosen by the artist for the chapel we
are considering? Why should this one get arrested in its flight and
made immortal when so many worthier ones have perished? Yet
preserved it assuredly is; it is as though some fairy's wand had
struck the medieval Miss Pinkerton, Amelia Sedley, and others who do
duty instead of the Hebrew originals. It has locked them up as
sleeping beauties, whose charms all may look upon. Surely the hours
are like the women grinding at the mill--the one is taken and the
other left, and none can give the reason more than he can say why
Gallio should have won immortality by caring for none of "these
things.
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