the _naive_ sportiveness
of her remarks called a smile to the placid lip of Vane, and smoothed
the anxious front of Trevylyan himself; as for Du-----e, who had much of
the boon companion beneath his professional gravity, he broke out every
now and then into snatches of French songs and drinking glees, which he
declared were the result of the air of Bacharach. Thus conversing, the
ruins of Furstenberg, and the echoing vale of Rheindeibach, glided past
their sail; then the old town of Lorch, on the opposite bank (where the
red wine is said first to have been made), with the green island before
it in the water. Winding round, the stream showed castle upon castle
alike in ruins, and built alike upon scarce accessible steeps. Then came
the chapel of St. Clements and the opposing village of Asmannshausen;
the lofty Rossell, built at the extremest verge of the cliff; and now
the tower of Hatto, celebrated by Southey's ballad, and the ancient
town of Bingen. Here they paused a while from their voyage, with the
intention of visiting more minutely the Rheingau, or valley of the
Rhine.

It must occur to every one of my readers, that, in undertaking, as now,
in these passages in the history of Trevylyan, scarcely so much a tale
as an episode in real life, it is very difficult to offer any interest
save of the most simple and unexciting kind. It is true that to
Trevylyan every day, every hour, had its incident; but what are those
incidents to others? A cloud in the sky; a smile from the lip of
Gertrude,--these were to him far more full of events than had been the
most varied scenes of his former adventurous career; but the history of
the heart is not easily translated into language; and the world will not
readily pause from its business to watch the alternations in the cheek
of a dying girl.

In the immense sum of human existence what is a single unit? Every
sod on which we tread is the grave of some former being; yet is there
something that softens without enervating the heart in tracing in the
life of another those emotions that all of us have known ourselves. For
who is there that has not, in his progress through life, felt all its
ordinary business arrested, and the varieties of fate commuted into one
chronicle of the affections? Who has not watched over the passing away
of some being, more to him at that epoch than all the world? And this
unit, so trivial to the calculation of others, of what inestimable value
was it not to h