irst love, sadly beautiful, with a hallowed
sweetness in her melancholy features and grace in the flow of her sable
robe. Next appears a shade of ruined loveliness, with dust among her
golden hair and her bright garments all faded and defaced, stealing
from your glance with drooping head, as fearful of reproach; she was
your fondest Hope, but a delusive one; so call her Disappointment now.
A sterner form succeeds, with a brow of wrinkles, a look and gesture of
iron authority; there is no name for him unless it be Fatality, an
emblem of the evil influence that rules your fortunes; a demon to whom
you subjected yourself by some error at the outset of life, and were
bound his slave forever, by once obeying him. See! those fiendish
lineaments graven on the darkness, the writhed lip of scorn, the
mockery of that living eye, the pointed finger, touching the sore place
in your heart! Do you remember any act of enormous folly, at which you
would blush, even in the remotest cavern of the earth? Then recognize
your Shame.

Pass, wretched band! Well for the wakeful one if, riotously miserable,
a fiercer tribe do not surround him, the devils of a guilty heart, that
holds its hell within itself. What if Remorse should assume the
features of an injured friend? What if the fiend should come in
woman's garments, with a pale beauty amid sin and desolation, and lie
down by your side? What if he should stand at your bed's foot, in the
likeness of a corpse, with a bloody stain upon the shroud? Sufficient
without such guilt is this nightmare of the soul; this heavy, heavy
sinking of the spirits; this wintry gloom about the heart; this
indistinct horror of the mind, blending itself with the darkness of the
chamber. . . . Now comes the peal of the distant clock, with fainter
and fainter strokes as you plunge farther into the wilderness of sleep.
It is the knell of a temporary death. Your spirit has departed, and
strays like a free citizen, among the people of a shadowy world,
beholding strange sights, yet without wonder or dismay. So calm,
perhaps, will be the final change, so undisturbed, as if among familiar
things. The entrance of the soul to its eternal home!

HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW.

THE BELEAGUERED CITY.

I have read, in some old marvelous tale,
Some legend strange and vague,
That a midnight host of specters pale
Beleaguered the walls of Prague.

Beside the Moldau's rushing stream,
Wi