self of his good fortune
in this exception to his accustomed trial of patience. The vis-a-vis
stopped, and Lord Cadurcis bounded out with a light step and a lighter
heart. His table was covered with letters. The first one that caught
his eye was a missive from Lady Monteagle. Cadurcis seized it like a
wild animal darting on its prey, tore it in half without opening it,
and, grasping the poker, crammed it with great energy into the fire.
This exploit being achieved, Cadurcis began walking up and down the
room; and indeed he paced it for nearly a couple of hours in a deep
reverie, and evidently under a considerable degree of excitement, for
his gestures were violent, and his voice often audible. At length,
about an hour after midnight, he rang for his valet, tore off his
cravat, and hurled it to one corner of the apartment, called for his
robe de chambre, soda water, and more lights, seated himself, and
began pouring forth, faster almost than his pen could trace the words,
the poem that he had been meditating ever since he had quitted the
roof where he had met Venetia. She had expressed a wish to read his
poems; he had resolved instantly to compose one for her solitary
perusal Thus he relieved his heart:

I.

Within a cloistered pile, whose Gothic towers
Rose by the margin of a sedgy lake,
Embosomed in a valley of green bowers,
And girt by many a grove and ferny brake
Loved by the antlered deer, a tender youth
Whom Time to childhood's gentle sway of love
Still spared; yet innocent as is the dove,
Nor mounded yet by Care's relentless tooth;
Stood musing, of that fair antique domain
The orphan lord! And yet, no childish thought
With wayward purpose holds its transient reign
In his young mind, with deeper feelings fraught;
Then mystery all to him, and yet a dream,
That Time has touched with its revealing beam.

II.

There came a maiden to that lonely boy,
And like to him as is the morn to night;
Her sunny face a very type of joy,
And with her soul's unclouded lustre bright.
Still scantier summers had her brow illumed
Than that on which she threw a witching smile,
Unconscious of the spell that could beguile
His being of the burthen it was doomed
By his ancestral blood to bear: a spirit,
Rife with desponding thoughts and fancies drear,
A moody soul that men sometimes inherit,
And worse than all the woes the world may bear.
But when he met that maiden's daz