, which was partially open, and the still air of an evening in
the first infancy of spring came fresh, and fraught as it were with a
prediction of the glowing woods and the reviving verdure, to my cheek.
The stars, one by one, kindled, as if born of Heaven and Twilight, into
their nightly being; and, through the vapour and thick ether of the
dense city, streamed their most silent light, holy and pure, and
resembling that which the Divine Mercy sheds upon the gross nature of
mankind. But, shadowy and calm, their rays fell full upon the face
of Isora, as she lay on the ground beside my couch, and with one hand
surrendered to my clasp, looked upward till, as she felt my gaze, she
turned her cheek blushingly away. There was quiet around and above us;
but beneath the window we heard at times the sounds of the common earth,
and then insensibly our hands knit into a closer clasp, and we felt them
thrill more palpably to our hearts; for those sounds reminded us both of
our existence and of our separation from the great herd of our race!

What is love but a division from the world, and a blending of two souls,
two immortalities divested of clay and ashes, into one? it is a severing
of a thousand ties from whatever is harsh and selfish, in order to
knit them into a single and sacred bond! Who loves hath attained the
anchorite's secret; and the hermitage has become dearer than the world.
O respite from the toil and the curse of our social and banded state,
a little interval art thou, suspended between two eternities,--the Past
and the Future,--a star that hovers between the morning and the night,
sending through the vast abyss one solitary ray from heaven, but too far
and faint to illumine, while it hallows the earth!

There was nothing in Isora's tale which the reader has not already
learned or conjectured. She had left her Andalusian home in her early
childhood, but she remembered it well, and lingeringly dwelt over it in
description. It was evident that little, in our colder and less genial
isle, had attracted her sympathy, or wound itself into her affection.
Nevertheless, I conceive that her naturally dreamy and abstracted
character had received from her residence and her trials here much of
the vigour and the heroism which it now possessed. Brought up alone,
music, and books--few, though not ill-chosen, for Shakspeare was one,
and the one which had made upon her the most permanent impression, and
perhaps had coloured her temp