eader, to the fairest scenes in England,--scenes
consecrated by the only true pastoral poetry we have known to
Contemplation and Repose.

Autumn had begun to tinge the foliage on the banks of Winandermere. It
had been a summer of unusual warmth and beauty; and if that year you
had visited the English lakes, you might, from time to time, amidst the
groups of happy idlers you encountered, have singled out two persons
for interest, or, perhaps, for envy. Two who might have seemed to you in
peculiar harmony with those serene and soft retreats, both young--both
beautiful. Lovers you would have guessed them to be; but such lovers
as Fletcher might have placed under the care of his "Holy
Shepherdess"--forms that might have reclined by

"The virtuous well, about whose flowery banks
The nimble-footed fairies dance their rounds
By the pale moonshine."

For in the love of those persons there seemed a purity and innocence
that suited well their youth and the character of their beauty. Perhaps,
indeed, on the girl's side, love sprung rather from those affections
which the spring of life throws upward to the surface, as the spring of
earth does its flowers, than from that concentrated and deep absorption
of self in self, which alone promises endurance and devotion, and of
which first love, or rather the first fancy, is often less susceptible
than that which grows out of the more thoughtful fondness of maturer
years. Yet he, the lover, was of so rare and singular a beauty, that he
might well seem calculated to awake, to the utmost, the love which wins
the heart through the eyes.

But to begin at the beginning. A lady of fashion had, in the autumn
previous to the year in which our narrative re-opens, taken, with her
daughter, a girl then of about eighteen, the tour of the English lakes.
Charmed by the beauty of Winandermere, and finding one of the most
commodious villas on its banks to be let, they had remained there all
the winter. In the early spring a severe illness had seized the elder
lady, and finding herself, as she slowly recovered, unfit for the
gaieties of a London season, nor unwilling, perhaps,--for she had been
a beauty in her day--to postpone for another year the debut of her
daughter, she had continued her sojourn, with short intervals of
absence, for a whole year. Her husband, a busy man of the world, with
occupation in London, and fine estates in the country, joined them
only occasionally, glad to e