developing itself in forebodings and omens which interested, because
they were steeped at once in the poetry and in the deep sincerity of her
nature. She was impressed with a strong and uncontrollable feeling that
her fate was predestined to a dark course and an early end; and she drew
from all things around her something to feed the pensive character of
her thoughts. The stillness of noon; the holy and eloquent repose of
twilight, its rosy sky and its soft air, its shadows and its dews,--had
equally for her heart a whisper and a spell. The wan stars, where,
from the eldest time, man has shaped out a chart of the undiscoverable
future; the mysterious moon, to which the great ocean ministers from its
untrodden shrines; the winds, which traverse the vast air, pilgrims from
an eternal home to an unpenetrated bourne; the illimitable heavens, on
which none ever gazed without a vague craving for something that the
earth cannot give, and a vague sense of a former existence in which that
something was enjoyed; the holy night; that solemn and circling sleep,
which seems, in its repose, to image our death, and in its living worlds
to shadow forth the immortal realms which only through that death we can
survey,--all had, for the deep heart of Isora, a language of omen and of
doom. Often would we wander alone, and for hours together, by the quiet
and wild woods and streams that surrounded her retreat, and which we
both loved so well; and often, when the night closed over us, with my
arm around her, and our lips so near that our atmosphere was our mutual
breath, would she utter, in that voice which "made the soul plant itself
in the ears," the predictions which had nursed themselves at her heart.

I remember one evening, in especial. The rich twilight had gathered
over us, and we sat by a slender and soft rivulet, overshadowed by some
stunted yet aged trees. We had both, before she spoke, been silent for
several minutes; and only when, at rare intervals, the birds sent from
the copse that backed us a solitary and vesper note of music, was the
stillness around us broken. Before us, on the opposite bank of the
stream, lay a valley, in which shadow and wood concealed all trace of
man's dwellings, save at one far spot, where, from a single hut, rose a
curling and thin vapour, like a spirit released from earth, and losing
gradually its earthier particles, as it blends itself with the loftier
atmosphere of heaven.

It was then that Isor