would leap into the devouring fire. Many
wondered in their anger that thou couldst be so callous to the old man's
grief--and couldst walk tearless at his coffin. The very night of the
day he was buried thou wert among thy wild companions, in a house of
infamy, close to the wall of the churchyard. Was not that enough to tell
us all that disease was in thy brain, and that reason, struggling with
insanity, had changed sorrow to despair. But perfect forgiveness--
forgiveness made tender by profoundest pity--was finally extended to
thee by all thy friends--frail and erring like thyself in many things,
although not so fatally misled and lost, because in the mystery of
Providence not so irresistibly tried. It seemed as if thou hadst
offended the Guardian Genius, who, according to the old philosophy which
thou knewest so well, is given to every human being at his birth; and
that then the angel left thy side, and Satan strove to drag thee to
perdition. And hath any peace come to thee--a youth no more--but in what
might have been the prime of manhood, bent down, they say, to the
ground, with a head all floating with silver hairs--hath any peace come
to thy distracted soul in these woods, over which there now seems again
to brood a holy horror? Yes--thy fine dark eyes are not wholly without
intelligence as they look on the sun, moon, and stars; although all
their courses seem now confused to thy imagination, once regular and
ordered in their magnificence before that intellect which science
claimed as her own. The harmonies of nature are not all lost on thy ear,
poured forth throughout all seasons, over the world of sound and sight.
Glimpses of beauty startle thee as thou wanderest along the shores of
thy prison-isle; and that fine poetical genius, not yet extinguished
altogether, although faint and flickering, gives vent to something like
snatches of songs, and broken elegies, that seem to wail over the ruins
of thy own soul! Such peace as ever visits them afflicted as thou art,
be with thee in cell or on shore; nor lost to Heaven will be the wild
moanings of--to us--thy unintelligible prayers!

But hark to the spirit-stirring voice of the bugle scaling the sky, and
leaping up and down in echoes among the distant mountains! Such a strain
animates the voltigeur, skirmishing in front of the line of battle, or
sending flashes of sudden death from the woods. Alas for him who now
deludes his yet high heart with a few notes of the music