y; there, youth in its first
flower, princely rank, boundless wealth, the sanguine expectation of an
illustrious career, and the prospect of that happiness which smiled from
the eyes of Fanny,--that contrast impressed me with a strange awe: death
seems so near to us when it strikes those whom life most flatters and
caresses. Whence is that curious sympathy that we all have with the
possessors of worldly greatness when the hour-glass is shaken and the
scythe descends? If the famous meeting between Diogenes and Alexander
had taken place, not before, but after the achievements which gave to
Alexander the name of Great, the Cynic would not, perhaps, have envied
the hero his pleasures nor his splendors,--neither the charms of Statira
nor the tiara of the Mede; but if, the day after, a cry had gone forth,
"Alexander the Great is dead!" verily I believe that Diogenes would
have coiled himself up in his tub and felt that with the shadow of the
stately hero something of glory and of warmth had gone from that sun
which it should darken never more. In the nature of man, the humblest or
the hardest, there is a something that lives in all of the Beautiful
or the Fortunate, which hope and desire have appropriated, even in the
vanities of a childish dream.

CHAPTER VI.

"Why are you here all alone, cousin? How cold and still it is amongst
the graves!"

"Sit down beside me, Blanche: it is not colder in the churchyard than on
the village green."

And Blanche sat down beside me, nestled close to me, and leaned her head
upon my shoulder. We were both long silent. It was an evening in
the early spring, clear and serene; the roseate streaks were fading
gradually from the dark gray of long, narrow, fantastic clouds. Tall,
leafless poplars, that stood in orderly level line on the lowland
between the churchyard and the hill, with its crown of ruins, left their
sharp summits distinct against the sky. But the shadows coiled dull and
heavy round the evergreens that skirted the churchyard, so that their
outline was vague and confused; and there was a depth in that lonely
stillness, broken only when the thrush flew out from the lower bushes,
and the thick laurel-leaves stirred reluctantly, and again were rigid
in repose. There is a certain melancholy in the evenings of early
spring which is among those influences of Nature the most universally
recognized, the most difficult to explain. The silent stir of reviving
life, which does not yet