summer noons
Was it the disease of her injured brain that made all things alive to her , -- that made her watch , in her ignorant way , the grave hills , the flashing , victorious rivers , look pitifully into the face of some starved hound , or dingy mushroom trodden in the mud before it scarce had lived , just as we should look into human faces to know what they would say to us ? Was it weakness and ignorance that made everything she saw or touched nearer , more human to her than to you or me ? She never got used to living as other people do ; these sights and sounds did not come to her common , hackneyed . Why , sometimes , out in the hills , in the torrid quiet of summer noons , she had knelt by the shaded pools , and buried her hands in the great slumberous beds of water-lilies , her blood curdling in a feverish languor , a passioned trance , from which she roused herself , weak and tired . She had no self-poised artist sense , this Lois , -- knew nothing of Nature 's laws , as you do . Yet sometimes , watching the dun sea of the prairie rise and fall in the crimson light of early morning , or , in the farms , breathing the blue air trembling up to heaven exultant with the life of bird and forest , she forgot the poor vile thing she was , some coarse weight fell off , and something within , not the sickly Lois of the mill , went out , free , like an exile dreaming of home . You tell me , that , doubtless , in the wreck of the creature 's brain , there were fragments of some artistic insight that made her thus rise above the level of her daily life , drunk with the mere beauty of form and colour .