They Sylvan Dance

As the music came fresher on their ears, they danced to its cadence,
extemporizing new steps and attitudes. Each varying movement had a grace
which might have been worth putting into marble, for the long delight of
days to come, but vanished with the movement that gave it birth, and was
effaced from memory by another. In Miriam's motion, freely as she flung
herself into the frolic of the hour, there was still an artful beauty;
in Donatello's, there was a charm of indescribable grotesqueness hand
in hand with grace; sweet, bewitching, most provocative of laughter,
and yet akin to pathos, so deeply did it touch the heart. This was the
ultimate peculiarity, the final touch, distinguishing between the sylvan
creature and the beautiful companion at his side. Setting apart only
this, Miriam resembled a Nymph, as much as Donatello did a Faun.

There were flitting moments, indeed, when she played the sylvan
character as perfectly as he. Catching glimpses of her, then, you would
have fancied that an oak had sundered its rough bark to let her dance
freely forth, endowed with the same spirit in her human form as that
which rustles in the leaves; or that she had emerged through the
pebbly bottom of a fountain, a water-nymph, to play and sparkle in
the sunshine, flinging a quivering light around her, and suddenly
disappearing in a shower of rainbow drops.

As the fountain sometimes subsides into its basin, so in Miriam there
were symptoms that the frolic of her spirits would at last tire itself
out.