all nature, giving to it that tranquil beauty which makes every thing
the eye rests upon glide with quiet rapture into the heart. The moth
butterflies were fluttering over the meadows, and from the low stretches
of softer green rose the thickly-growing grass-stalks, laying their
slender ear's bent with the mellow burthen of wild honey--the ambrosial
feast for the lips of innocence and childhood. It was, indeed, an
evening when love would bring forth its sweetest memories, and dream
itself into those ecstacies of tenderness that flow from the mingled
sensations of sadness and delight.

It would be difficult, perhaps impossible, to see on this earth a young
creature, whose youth and beauty, and slender grace of person gave her
more the appearance of some visionary spirit, too exquisitely ideal for
human life. Indeed, she seemed to be tinted with the hues of heaven, and
never did a mortal being exist in such fine and harmonious keeping with
the scene in which she moved. So light and sylph-like was her figure,
though tall, that the eye almost feared she would dissolve from before
it, and leave nothing to gaze at but the earth on which she trod. Yet
was there still apparent in her something that preserved, with singular
power, the delightful reality that she was of humanity, and subject to
all those softer influences that breathe their music so sweetly over the
chords of the human heart. The delicate bloom of her cheek, shaded
away as it was, until it melted into the light that sparkled from her
complexion--the snowy forehead, the flashing eye, in which sat the very
soul of love--the lips, blushing of sweets--her whole person breathing
the warmth of youth, and feeling, and so characteristic in the easiness
of its motions of that gracile flexibility that has never been known
to exist separate from the power of receiving varied and profound
emotions--all this told the spectator, too truly, that the lovely being
before him was not of another sphere, but one of the most delightful
that ever appeared in this.

But hush!--here is a strain of music! Oh! what lips breathed forth that
gush of touching melody which flows in such linked sweetness from the
flute of an unseen performer? How soft, how gentle, but oh, how very
mournful are the notes! Alas! they are steeped in sorrow, and melt away
in the plaintive cadences of despair, until they mingle with silence.
Surely, surely, they come from one whose heart has been brought low by