ait of the
proposed heroine of my story--but that you would
have had, had the story been written. I never could
draw a picture of a woman but from the life, and to
that fictitious tale I should have transferred,
with studied and careful truthfulness, the enamel
portrait burnt in upon my memory, and which you
would have admired my fancy for conceiving. Oh! the
mistake of supposing that we can imagine things
brighter than we have seen with our eyes--that
there is any kingdom of air, visitable by poets,
which is comparable to the glorious world we live
in, with its _some_ women, _some_ sunsets, _some_
strains of music, and _some_ fore-tasted
heaven-thrills of emotion.

The heir to one of the oldest titles of England was
the husband of this lady. The fortunes of his
family had been wasted; and they had lived for a
generation or two in comparative obscurity, when
the present Lord ---- came of age. He had been
educated carefully, but was of great personal
beauty, and I thought when I first saw him, was as
fine a model as I had ever seen of the quiet,
reserved, self-intrenched school of modern English
manners. With his beauty and his title, though with
little or no estate, he had easily married a lady
of fortune--the only daughter of a retired banker.
And this heiress, Lady ----, is the one whose story
I would have told through a veil of fiction.

The Countess of ---- was an unsurpassed horsewoman,
and rode constantly. Her blood-horses had been sent
round by ship from England; and she was always
mounted on an animal whose every fibre seemed
obedient to her thought, and with whose motion
every line of her own tall and slenderly-rounded
person, and every ringlet of her flowing, golden
curls seemed in a correspondence governed by the
very spirit of beauty. She rode with her rein
loose, and her mind apparently absorbed with any
thing but her horse. A turn of her head, or the
pressure of her foot upon his shoulder, was
probably the animal's guidance. But, of an
excessively impassioned nature, she conversed in
the saddle with the expression and