all my love for you,--it can
never decay."

"What a strange thing is life!" said Gertrude; "how unconnected, how
desultory seem all its links! Has this sweet pause from trouble, from
the ordinary cares of life--has it anything in common with your past
career, with your future? You will go into the great world; in a few
years hence these moments of leisure and musing will be denied to you.
The action that you love and court is a jealous sphere,--it allows no
wandering, no repose. These moments will then seem to you but as yonder
islands that stud the Rhine,--the stream lingers by them for a moment,
and then hurries on in its rapid course; they vary, but they do not
interrupt the tide."

"You are fanciful, my Gertrude; but your simile might be juster. Rather
let these banks be as our lives, and this river the one thought that
flows eternally by both, blessing each with undying freshness."

Gertrude smiled; and, as Trevylyan's arm encircled her, she sank her
beautiful face upon his bosom, he covered it with his kisses, and she
thought at the moment, that, even had she passed death, that embrace
could have recalled her to life.

They pursued their course to Mayence, partly by land, partly along
the river. One day, as returning from the vine-clad mountains of
Johannisberg, which commands the whole of the Rheingau, the most
beautiful valley in the world, they proceeded by water to the town of
Ellfeld, Gertrude said,--

"There is a thought in your favourite poet which you have often
repeated, and which I cannot think true,--

"'In nature there is nothing melancholy.'

"To me, it seems as if a certain melancholy were inseparable from
beauty; in the sunniest noon there is a sense of solitude and stillness
which pervades the landscape, and even in the flush of life inspires us
with a musing and tender sadness. Why is this?"

"I cannot tell," said Trevylyan, mournfully; "but I allow that it is
true."

"It is as if," continued the romantic Gertrude, "the spirit of the
world spoke to us in the silence, and filled us with a sense of our
mortality,--a whisper from the religion that belongs to nature, and is
ever seeking to unite the earth with the reminiscences of Heaven. Ah,
what without a heaven would be even love!--a perpetual terror of the
separation that must one day come! If," she resumed solemnly, after a
momentary pause, and a shadow settled on her young face, "if it be true,
Albert, that I must leave you soon--"