WINTER. IN SIX SONNETS. No. I.-DAYBREAK. SLOW clear away the misty shades of morn, No. II.-SNOW-STORM. How gloom the clouds! quite stifled is the ray, Look up!-a thousand thousand fairy motes Come dancing downwards, onwards, sideways whirl'd, The light-wing'd mass,-then, mantling o'er the field, No. III.-CLEAR FROST. 'Tis noon, the heaven is clear without a cloud; Of mingling crowds!-in graceful curves how swings The dulcet tones which Music landward flings.- Half-pain'd, half-pleased: yes! all is joy and mirth, No. IV.-MOONLIGHT. BEHOLD the mountain peaks how sharply lined Walks mid thin stars, whose lustre has declined.- Sleep in their stilly leaflessness; while, lost The wide world seems to slumber, and to freeze.- No. V.-VICISSITUDE. OH! sweetly beautiful it is to mark Of blossom'd greenery, perfume-glowing bowers, And Ceres, as she wanders, hears by fits The reapers' chant, beneath the mellowing sky;- And, mocking Earth, bid Man's thoughts point on high. No. VI. CONCLUSIONS. ALL things around us preach of Death; yet Mirth And had our everlasting home on earth!- Time is to us a brief probation given, To fit us for a dread eternity. Hear ye, that watch with Faith's unslumbering eye,- VOL. XXI L SELWYN IN SEARCH OF A DAUGHTER. CHAPTER I. EDWARD SELWYN TO THE REV. JOSEPH TREVOR. FOR the first time, my dear Trevor, since I set out on my inauspicious journey, I have found a moment's leisure to address you a few lines; rather to satisfy your friendly anxiety, than to communicate observations, which the distracted state of my mind, and the rapidity of my motions, alike preclude me from making. Aware as I was, on leaving London, that my unhappy daughter, and the partner of her flight, (her husband I can scarce yet bring myself to call him,) must ere this have reached Paris, I had, of course, no object but to arrive, if possible, in that city before they might have left it. You, who know me so well, can imagine how differently, under other circumstances, I should have viewed a journey, the object of many a fond speculation, which exquisite felicity at home alone prevented my realizing. Dejected and harassed as I was, by fruitless researches and sleepless nights, I could not, after an absence of nearly thirty years, tread without emotion the soil of that France, every page of whose history is more or less interwoven with ours, and whose crimes or exploits have for so many years wearied the trump of Fame. Of the numberless historical associations which dimly float around the decayed ramparts of Calais, my mind could only dwell with congenial bitterness on the strong expression of Mary, when, inconsolable for its loss, she was heard to exclaim," that its name on her death would be found written on her heart!" I feel, that on mine, something" sharper than a serpent's tooth" has indelibly inscribed that of Constance! The monotonous scenery of the north of France, is ill calculated to rouse from painful reveries; once only did I feel strong emotion, when the first sight of the blooming orchards of Normandy brought Herefordshire full on my mind: but with the flush of blossoms ended the resemblance. There wanted, to complete the picture, Paris, June 18-. my paternal mansion, with its venerable oaks, and the neat smiling cottages of our happy England. I found something more congenial to my present mood in the deserted chateaux, few and far between, and in that absence of human beings to animate the landscape, complained of by the more social traveller. St Denis, with its rifled tombs and royal victims, lay before me; the gloomy towers of Vincennes rose in view, in whose bloodstained fosse obscurely sleeps the last scion of a princely line. I felt like the philosophic Roman amid the ruins of Grecian greatness; my private griefs sunk into insignificance before the weight of miseries which France has borne, and in her turn inflicted. It is easy thus to moralize, but nature triumphs; and on entering Paris, it had for me no spot so attractive as the Bureau de Police, from whence I am just returned with information, which the lateness of the hour prevents my following up till to-morrow. The search may be protracted and fruitless; I will leave its result for another letter, and dispatch this to fulfil your friendly injunctions. I need not enjoin you to forward instantly any letter bearing a foreign post-mark. My child must write to her father, and possibly I may receive from you the first intelligence of one so guilty, yet so dear. Yours ever, EDWARD SELWYN. THE SAME TO THE SAME. Paris. I told you, Trevor, in my last, that my inquiries at the Bureau de Police had furnished me with what I fondly believed a clue to discover the fugitive, whom I then dreaded, while I longed to see; now that the prospect has, for the present, vanished, the latter sentiment alone predominates, and I lament as a fresh disappointment, what, at the moment, I could almost have hailed as a relief. Furnished with a description answering to that of my poor misguided child, I called at the house to which it directed me, and with a beating heart, and trembling limbs, found myself introduced into the presence of -a stranger! So fully had I been prepared for the assumption of a fictitious name, that I had scarcely allowed myself to admit the possibility of Madame de la Rive (corresponding in age, stature, complexion, and period of arrival, with her I sought) proving another than my Constance. Judge then of my feelings on the annihilation of hopes so sanguine! The young woman, on whom I had thus intruded, received me politely, and readily admitted the incoherent excuses I was able to offer for my mistake. She inspired me with interest by her deep dejection, and from what I have since learned of her situation, I have reason to think her yet more unfortunate, as well as criminal, than my inexperienced child. She was once the happy wife of an indulgent husband, but, by following the fortunes of a profligate seducer, she has stamped with misery all the future years of a life hardly yet in its prime. Her father is not unknown to me, and when I compare his lot with mine, I feel that I may yet cherish hopes to which he must be a stranger, and I bless Providence for the lesson of resignation! Pierre, (a trusty Swiss, procured for me by S in London,) to whom I have, of course, been obliged, in general terms, to communicate, that I am in search of individuals whom I am most anxious to discover, has suggested the obvious course of frequenting those places of universal resort most favourable for accidental rencontres. The task is an irksome one; but, stimulated by hope, and too much agitated to find rest practicable, I suffer myself to be led wherever a concourse of idlers permits me to prosecute my researches, at least unobserved. With a perseverance equal to that of the veteran loungers of the place, have I sat hours in the garden of the Tuileries, my eyes apparently fixed on the gay groups that flitted before me, without, in fact, taking any further cognizance of them, than sufficed to ascertain whom they did not contain. I wander up and down the endless Gallery of the Louvre, at times beguiled by the masterpieces which yet decorate its walls, into a momentary forgetfulness of my anxieties; but, how quickly do I turn even from the sea-pieces of my favourite Vernet, or the living landscapes of Claude, to follow with eager scrutiny every light youthful figure that glides along the gallery! I strolled one evening into the Theatre Français-It happened to be Iphigénie; and the character of the stoical father appeared to me so absurdly unnatural, that, but for my sympathy with the maternal grief of Clytemnestra, I could not have sat it out. Nothing, since I came to France, has so effectually, for the moment, relieved the "sickness of hope deferred," as my excursion to Versailles, whose desolate chambers teem with historical associations, with the glories of the Siècle de Louis Quatorze, and the misfortunes of his ill-fated proge ny. The Memoirs of the former brilliant period have been the favourite amusement of my leisure hours; and fancy easily repeopled the lone galleries of Versailles, with the Turennes and Condés, who filled its page with triumphs, with the Boileaus, the Racines, and the Fenelons, of its Augustan age; and even with those less important personages, whose adventures have descended to us in the matchless gossiping of that memoirwriting period, the Lauzuns, the Bussis, the La Valiéres, and that delightful Sevigné, whose wit and tenderness would alike have been lost to posterity, had she not idolized-a daughter! It was impossible to see the Council Chamber, and not to conjure up Madame de Maintenon and her tambour frame, occupying the corner; or to gaze on the faded splendour of the Chapel, (where a solitary lamp chanced to burn in honour of a saint,) without imagining it lighted up in an equally unostentatious manner, for the stolen ceremony which placed that extraordinary woman on the list of Queens. The anti-chamber, where sovereigns eagerly awaited an audience of the Grand Monarque, and the Salle de Spectacle, where the aimable Vainqueur so often led up the ball, are alike solitary and deserted; indeed, the latter matchless private Theatre is now only a receptacle for lumber, and sadly tapissé with portraits of many a Bourbon, to whom the necessitie the times still deny frames and gilding. All at Versailles harmonizes with these antique recollections; the execrably formal style of the gardens, the cruelly clipped, yet venerable orange trees, flourishing alone unchanged amid the wreck of centuries; the groups of allegorical statuary, particularly the celebrated one of the Monarch as Apollo, surrounded by his female favourites, all speak of the olden time, and one would regret their disappearance. From the gorgeous vestiges of the Siècle de Louis Quatorze, the transition is strange to the sorrows of Marie Antoinette. Who could see unmoved her chamber, bearing more evidently than any other the traces of popular fury; the balcony where she heroically appeared before a ferocious rabble bent on her destruction; the narrow passage through which she escaped on the night of her intended assassination, only, alas! to prolong for further suffering a miserable existence? It was impossible to hear these scenes described on the spot by an ancient Swiss, an eye-witness of those horfors, without shuddering. But nowhere is the memory of that unfortunate Princess more entwined with every feature of the scene, than at the Petit Trianon, that charming retreat, where alone, in all the vast domain of Versailles, Nature has been allowed free scope, and where the unconscious family of Louis Seize beguiled the ennui of greatness, by imitating, in the fictitious hamlet in the gardens, the humbler conditions of human life. The Queen's beautiful marble-lined dairy yet remains, and the hameau, and all parts of the garden, seem almost miraculously to have escaped devastation; but they have a melancholy and forlorn aspect, which accords well with the ideas they inspire, and the daughter of Marie Antoinette frequently spends a few hours there alone, with what complicated feelings none but royal sufferers can know. I returned from Versailles in a frame of mind less irritable, to resume my now almost hopeless task. I shall await one more post from England, and if it again disappoints me, I shall proceed south, concluding that the desire of revisiting his native country has hurried the destroyer of my peace to his beloved Italy.-Italy! with what delight did I once contemplate a pilgrimage to that classic country, as a meet completion of the education of that child, whose very talents have proved her bane! Music, my former passion, is now a source of exquisite pain, and its combination with the Italian language rendered my only visit to the opera so irksome, that nothing would tempt me to go again. This crowded metropolis is now to me a dreary solitude, which I would gladly exchange for that of my postchaise. To-morrow I set out, ifalas! I need hardly cherish the hope. Yours ever, E. S. THE SAME TO THE SAME. Lyons, July 18 THE date of this, my dear Trevor, will no doubt surprise you, and you will sympathise with me in being thus long detained on a journey, the very expedition of which defeated its end, by occasioning a feverish illness, from which I am gradually recovering. To pursue my journey, is as yet impossible; but I cannot compel my mind to partake my body's inactivity, and I will give it employment by replying, though at the expense of some pain, ved at Paris, in which you delicately to the postscript of your last receiremind me, that your absence from Herefordshire has left you unacquainted with the rise and progress of that unhappy attachment, of which you only returned in time to deplore the disastrous conclusion. shall have to claim your indulgence By a father, left like myself, sole parent of an only daughter, the establishment in our neighbourhood of a depot for prisoners of war ought naturally to have been viewed with dissatisfaction and distrust; and indeed these prudential considerations induced me long to do violence to my feelings, by abstaining from hospitalities towards a set of brave men, the ennui of whose captivity I might otherwise have been tempted to alleviate. After meeting them, however, occasionally |