e with Ellinor he
returned abroad for some time, but finally settling in England, engaged
in active life, and left to his posterity a name they still honour; and
to his country, the memory of some services that will not lightly pass
away."

But one dread and gloomy remembrance never forsook his mind, and
exercised the most powerful influence over the actions and motives of
his life. In every emergency, in every temptation, there rose to
his eyes the fate of him so gifted, so noble in much, so formed
for greatness in all things, blasted by one crime--self-sought, but
self-denied; a crime, the offspring of bewildered reasonings--all
the while speculating upon virtue. And that fate revealing the darker
secrets of our kind, in which the true science of morals in chiefly
found, taught him the twofold lesson, caution for himself, and charity
for others. He knew henceforth that even the criminal is not all evil;
the angel within us is not easily expelled; it survives sin, ay, and
many sins, and leaves us sometimes in amaze and marvel, at the good that
lingers round the heart even of the hardiest offender.

And Ellinor clung with more than revived affection to one with whose lot
she was now allied. Walter was her last tie upon earth, and in him she
learnt, day by day, more lavishly to treasure up her heart. Adversity
and trial had ennobled the character of both; and she who had so long
seen in her cousin all she could love, beheld now in her husband that
greater and more enduring spell--all that she could venerate and admire.
A certain religious fervour, in which, after the calamities of her
family, she had indulged, continued with her to the last; but, (softened
by human ties, and the reciprocation of earthly duties and affections,)
it was fortunately preserved either from the undue enthusiasm or the
undue austerity into which it would otherwise, in all likelihood, have
merged. What remained, however, uniting her most cheerful thoughts with
something serious, and the happiest moments of the present with the dim
and solemn forecast of the future, elevated her nature, not depressed,
and made itself visible rather in tender than in sombre, hues. And it
was sweet when the thought of Madeline and her father came across her,
to recur at once for consolation to that Heaven in which she believed
their tears were dried, and their past sorrows but a forgotten dream!
There is, indeed, a time of life when these reflections make our chief