a deplorable
beauty--eyes closed, and her hands clasped upon her breast! "Dead, dead,
dead!" muttered in his ringing ears a voice from the tombs, and he fell
down in the midst of them with great violence upon the floor.

Encircled with arms that lay round him softer and silkier far than
flower-wreaths on the neck of a child who has laid him down from play,
was he when he awoke from that fit--lying even on his own maiden's bed,
and within her very bosom, that beat yet, although soon about to beat no
more. At that blest awakening moment, he might have thought he saw the
first glimpse of light of the morning after his marriage-day; for her
face was turned towards his breast, and with her faint breathings he
felt the touch of tears. Not tears alone now bedimmed those eyes, for
tears he could have kissed away; but the blue lids were heavy with
something that was not slumber--the orbs themselves were scarcely
visible--and her voice--it was gone, to be heard never again, till in
the choir of white-robed spirits that sing at the right hand of God.

Yet no one doubted that she knew him--him who had dropt down, like a
superior being, from another sphere, on the innocence of her simple
childhood--had taught her to know so much of her own soul--to love her
parents with a profounder and more holy love--to see, in characters more
divine, Heaven's promises of forgiveness to every contrite heart--and a
life of perfect blessedness beyond death and the grave. A smile that
shone over her face the moment that she had been brought to know that he
had come at last, and was nigh at hand--and that never left it while her
bosom moved--no--not for all the three days and nights that he continued
to sit beside the corpse, when father and mother were forgetting their
cares in sleep--that smile told all who stood around, watching her
departure, neighbour, friend, priest, parent, and him the suddenly
distracted and desolate, that in the very moment of expiration she knew
him well, and was recommending him and his afflictions to the pity of
One who died to save sinners.

Three days and three nights, we have said, did he sit beside her who so
soon was to have been his bride; and come or go who would into the room,
he saw them not--his sight was fixed on the winding-sheet, eyeing it,
without a single tear, from feet to forehead, and sometimes looking up
to heaven. As men forgotten in dungeons have lived miserably long
without food, so did he--and so