The hours that succeeded that day of sorrow were passed in deep humiliation-in woe unutterable. In the solitude of night I watched over the couch of the dead and the living in prayer and supplication I waited the first deepdrawn groan of returning consciousness, and witnessed the writhings of a crushed and self-upbraiding spirit, compared to which the bitterness of death itself would have been sweet. In trembling and horror unspeakable, I struggled with the wild phrenzy of a despairing soul, and held, during the unholy transports of a rebellious spirit, the arm of the sinner that sought his own destruction. The contest could not last. Human strength could not long endure the riot of human passions in their fury. The shades of night heard the last faint cry of delirium, and the cheerless rays of a chill December morning at length gave me light to watch over the bed of the insensible and exhausted Edward.

The seeds of life are deeply rooted and mysteriously nourished. Days and nights of uncertainty succeeded each other, and after I had watched him through sorrow and sickness-through fearful relapses of body and mind, I beheld him arise and go forth into the world an altered and a wretched beingwasted, conscience-stricken and heartbroken. But the world reminded him of all he had lost, and he fled from its presence in despair. Alas! it availed him nothing that he fled. He bore within him wherever he went, in solitude and in society, the never-dying stings which the conviction that all his calamities had their origin in his own ungovernable passions and precipitancy inflicted-the unslumbering vengeance which Almighty justice has doomed the guilty mind to wreak upon itself. He knew no tranquillity-no remission of his wretchedness; his heart was torn asunder by the ravages of

tary converse, allude to past events. Now, however, I determined to make trial of the last hope that was left meto break up, even by some sudden shock, the freezing of the spirit which I too plainly saw was setting in. Upon a bright and cheery day towards the latter end of spring, I protracted our accustomed evening ramble beyond its usual length, and, as the sun was sinking in the heavens, we stood beside a lowly grave in the retired churchyard of For a moment he looked upon it with an unconscious gaze. Intently-breathlessly I watched his countenance. His pallid cheek flushed with a sudden fire—his cold and languid eyes beamed with the troubled light of half-revived recollection; then, as the big, blinding drops slowly gathered within them, he read in a stifled voice the only two words that composed the unostentatious inscription.

"Lucy L-' My own poor Lucy! would to God that I were laid beside thee."

But, alas! even this my last faint hope was torn from me. Soon I perceived that old recollections were flooding in fast and fiercely upon him. I found that I did only shake a chord, whose wild jarring was a thousand times more terrific than its eternal silence. The conviction that the grave had for him closed for ever upon "the love where Death has set his seal," brought madness with it, and in a state of feeling that fell but little short of his former distraction, he rushed past me, out of the churchyard. Bitterly did I then learn that the emotions of the heart laugh to scorn the speculations of man, and I felt, as I followed my friend from all that now remained of his youthful love, that

That parlour at was certainly one of the most comfortable rooms I ever sat, read, wrote, or dined in. Conceive a small apartment, originally built for a library, to which books were essential, not thrust in, an afterthought, upon the walls in awkward, inconvenient, and unsightly excrescences, but inserted with graceful ease beneath broad mahogany mouldings, and between pilasters formed after the purest Grecian taste-all this wall-fruit, too, exposed and unprotected, tempting the hand to gather freely as occasion or appetite might incite or serve, without any of those cautious net-works, behind which literary gardeners so often think proper to encage them-furnished moreover with chairs adapted for reading, dining, and sleeping; that is to say, hard, medium, and soft-a sofa also for the latter purpose, when the indulgence was to be taken at full length-a table of the blackest old mahogany, displaying the substantiality of the beginning of the last century in every leg, in the day time covered with heavy tapestry of coeval formation, and reflecting glass, fruit, wine, and smiles from its honest brown face from the time of its after-dinner exposure ;imagine one extremity of this apartment facing the south-west, and curved outwards in the form of a bow, having two windows, and between them a glass door, from which you might walk from the luxury of a Turkish carpet down two easy steps to the still more exquisite softness of a smooth shaven sod; imagine this, with all the materials for writing, a well arranged catalogue, and a light library ladder, and still you can form no idea of the comfort of that VOL. II.

Λογγ. περ. υψ. 44.

little room at . There was besides to me, as I sat one evening last month at about six o'clock, after my solitary and abstemious meal, beside the aforesaid table, on one of the medium, or dinner chairs, my feet stretched upon another, a goblet of sherry and water with a few biscuits at my elbow, my eyes faintly conscious of the landscape that met them through the most southern window (for the jalousies were closed upon the others,) and my heartGod knows where; there was, I say, a peculiar enchantment then thrown around every thing. Old habit had familiarised each object to me. The books! I knew every edition. Many of them were noted in my hand; and I conceived (for I am not without my little vanities) that their value was thus enhanced. The very furniture was prized from old acquaintance. But above all, the direction my eyes took was interesting to me they looked down an open valley, near the middle of which wound a gentle stream, on one side so closely wooded as to have its bank completely concealed, and seeming to sleep far in beneath the foliage of the willow and ash which, drooping pendant above its waters, formed the lower boundary of the more stately forest trees that rolled their shade up the long slope, and over the crest of the hill beyond the reach of the eye; and on the other skirting a lowland lawn, upon whose edge, and following the course of the river, a small path might be traced by the darkened green of the grass. Occasional tufts of trees relieved the outline of this plain, till it reached the rise of the vale on the other side, where a few cottages and

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orchards were perched along a small ridge of half-ivied rocks, that now looked bright, as they smiled back the rays of an evening sun. This happy valley terminated at about two miles distance in the sea, where one of its sides rose into a tolerably lofty promontory ere it made its final plunge. Across the tranquil breast of ocean the eye caught a far shore, with white cliffs, and over one part of it the dusky ensign of population floating in a long, dense, dismal line of smoke. This, as I gazed upon it through the deep embrasure of the window, and over a low stretch of flower-plat immediately without, gave rise to a train of thoughts in my mind, that in its present softened and dreamy state, were far from being unpleasing. Before me was the path, that from my childhood I had traversed, winding as beautiful-as sequestered as ever. My fancy took me round every bend in it, shewing me the sheltered nook which had inspired my first attempt at angling -the calm bay where my frail bark was first entrusted to the stream-and farther on, the jutting rock, whence I had ventured to take my first plunge into the depths of the element, that had proved itself trustworthy with regard to my little vessel. There were the trees that I had climbed, occasionally for frolic-oftener for a hidingplace-unscaleable to tutors on the earth beneath; the rocks, too, in the clefts of which I had basked out many

a

summer holiday, and thought indescribable things;-all were now beheld together beneath the rich ray of summer sun-set, unchanged in their aspect, like the steady regard of a familiar friend. The whole perspective appeared to my contemplative gaze to present no inappropriate representation of my own course through life, and experience travelled side by side with sense, and confirmed the resemblance. The opening of my career was in the garden, along a formal path, marked out by others, smooth, direct, and bordered with the little flowers and

weeds of childish pleasures and pains; thence by an easy slope I descended into the more devious windings of the prairie, where as I bounded along the path of early youth, the variety became greater, and the valley which had confined my view on either side, widened out, till at last upon my entering on the academic course, I was launched upon a little sea, where prudence and circumspection were required to gain the opposite shore. There rose the white and barren cliffs of idleness, on which so many voyagers were miserably wrecked, and there was the city, that world, upon which I had not long entered. What feelings does the view of a populous and fervent city inspire in the mind of a remote and calm observer! Over it for ever hangs the thick canopy, that seems as if stretched by common consent between heaven and the deeds of assembled mankind. What a contrast to nature, unveiled and innocent in the presence of the Creator! Let the imagination pierce the darkness, and pry for a moment into the recesses that it would hide. How many a scene is silently enacting beneath the holy summer's eve, that could not stand its light? Ascend yon miserable creaking stairs, in the obscurest corner of this region of vice, and behold stretched upon the pallet, from which she is never to rise, the victim of passion and of man, now awakened when it is too late from the transient intoxication of pleasure to horror and unavailing remorse. Observe the beauty of the form-the high contour of features, proving that she must be tasting the cup of bitterness, as she rolls her haggard and sunken eye round the filthy, fœtid apartment, in a corner of which she lies, and thinks of her first sweet yielding of the charmer's voice—of him, that charmer-of the village greenof the friends of her innocence family-of her mother-of-Oh! horror of the thought-of her father! she looks forward—what sees she there? her God!* But there is even now

of her