a nun of the convent, whom she
was glad to dismiss, for her heart was melancholy, and her attention
so much abstracted, that conversation with a stranger was painful. She
thought her father daily declining, and attributed his present fatigue
more to the feeble state of his frame, than to the difficulty of the
journey. A train of gloomy ideas haunted her mind, till she fell asleep.

In about two hours after, she was awakened by the chiming of a bell, and
then heard quick steps pass along the gallery, into which her chamber
opened. She was so little accustomed to the manners of a convent, as to
be alarmed by this circumstance; her fears, ever alive for her father,
suggested that he was very ill, and she rose in haste to go to him.
Having paused, however, to let the persons in the gallery pass before
she opened her door, her thoughts, in the mean time, recovered from the
confusion of sleep, and she understood that the bell was the call of
the monks to prayers. It had now ceased, and, all being again still,
she forbore to go to St. Aubert's room. Her mind was not disposed
for immediate sleep, and the moon-light, that shone into her chamber,
invited her to open the casement, and look out upon the country.

It was a still and beautiful night, the sky was unobscured by any cloud,
and scarce a leaf of the woods beneath trembled in the air. As she
listened, the mid-night hymn of the monks rose softly from a chapel,
that stood on one of the lower cliffs, an holy strain, that seemed to
ascend through the silence of night to heaven, and her thoughts ascended
with it. From the consideration of His works, her mind arose to the
adoration of the Deity, in His goodness and power; wherever she turned
her view, whether on the sleeping earth, or to the vast regions of
space, glowing with worlds beyond the reach of human thought, the
sublimity of God, and the majesty of His presence appeared. Her eyes
were filled with tears of awful love and admiration; and she felt that
pure devotion, superior to all the distinctions of human system, which
lifts the soul above this world, and seems to expand it into a nobler
nature; such devotion as can, perhaps, only be experienced, when
the mind, rescued, for a moment, from the humbleness of earthly
considerations, aspires to contemplate His power in the sublimity of His
works, and His goodness in the infinity of His blessings.

Is it not now the hour,
The holy hour, when to the cloudless height