ight Visitors who hovered round their Eden--

'Millions of spiritual creatures walk the earth,
Unseen, both when we wake and when we sleep.'

"'How often,' says Father Adam, 'from the steep of echoing hill or
thicket, have we heard celestial voices to the midnight air, sole,
or responsive to each other's notes, singing!' After the Act of
Disobedience, when the erring pair from Eden took their solitary way,
and went forth to toil and trouble on common earth--though the Glorious
Ones no longer were visible, you cannot say they were gone. It was not
that the Bright Ones were absent, but that the dim eyes of rebel man no
longer could see them. In your chamber hangs a picture of one whom you
never knew, but whom you have long held in tenderest regard, and who
was painted for you by a friend of mine, the Knight of Plympton. She
communes with you. She smiles on you. When your spirits are low, her
bright eyes shine on you and cheer you. Her innocent sweet smile is
a caress to you. She never fails to soothe you with her speechless
prattle. You love her. She is alive with you. As you extinguish your
candle and turn to sleep, though your eyes see her not, is she not
there still smiling? As you lie in the night awake, and thinking of your
duties, and the morrow's inevitable toil oppressing the busy, weary,
wakeful brain as with a remorse, the crackling fire flashes up for a
moment in the grate, and she is there, your little Beauteous Maiden,
smiling with her sweet eyes! When moon is down, when fire is out, when
curtains are drawn, when lids are closed, is she not there, the little
Beautiful One, though invisible, present and smiling still? Friend, the
Unseen Ones are round about us. Does it not seem as if the time were
drawing near when it shall be given to men to behold them?"

The print of which my friend spoke, and which, indeed, hangs in my room,
though he has never been there, is that charming little winter piece of
Sir Joshua, representing the little Lady Caroline Montague, afterwards
Duchess of Buccleuch. She is represented as standing in the midst of a
winter landscape, wrapped in muff and cloak; and she looks out of her
picture with a smile so exquisite that a Herod could not see her without
being charmed.

"I beg your pardon, MR. PINTO," I said to the person with whom I was
conversing. (I wonder, by the way, that I was not surprised at his
knowing how fond I am of this print.) "You spoke of the Knight of
Ply