atal letter, or sung, which she did
continually, that mournful song of Thecla.

The world it is empty, the heart will die,
There's nothing to wish for beneath the sky:
Thou Holy One, call Thy child away--
I've lived and loved; and that was to-day--
Make ready my grave-clothes to-morrow.

Such was the early and melancholy close of a young life of the loveliest
promise. The severe and sudden horror struck hard upon her fine mind,
and drove it mournfully astray. Her heart was so broken that she could
not live on. But Julius Alvinzi did not then or so perish: for seventeen
weeks he lay upon a hospital bed in Mantua, helpless as an infant;
and finally recovered so much of health as gave him again the common
promise of life. He was afterwards sent to pass the long period of his
convalescence at Venice; but the Julius Alvinzi, who rode forth from
Salzburgh, was no longer to be recognised: crippled in his limbs--his
fine countenance disfigured by deep and unsightly scars--his complexion
pale--his hair turned grey with suffering. He had already stepped on
twenty years in as many weeks, and he was already, to the eye, a worn
and broken-down officer of veterans. He could not stir a pace without
crutches; and his hip had been so shattered and distorted that it was
painful to see him move. It was well that Beatrice was in her grave. No
doubt she would have exhibited the noble constancy of a pure, angelic,
and true love;--but she was spared that longer and heavier trial.

Alvinzi, like a stricken deer, betook himself, with decayed hopes and an
aching bosom, to a retired valley near Burgersdorf, about ten miles from
Vienna. Here he took a small fishing cottage, near a lone and lovely
stream, which flowed across a few velvet meadows, amid deep dells
and still woods; and here he threw himself on the beautiful bosom of
nature as on that of a mother. Here, for the first time, he was made
acquainted, by a letter and a packet from the aged and desolate Adony,
of the melancholy end of the lovely Beatrice. The packet contained a
small cross which she had always worn, her miniature, and her psalter.

The traveller who may now wander into the little valley, near
Burgersdorf, where Alvinzi dwelt, will find the cypress, planted upon
his grave the day after his funeral, only three years' growth; and if he
go and sit under the tree, beneath which Alvinzi reposed his withered
and broken frame for thirty summers, will perhaps agree