y thus made contiguous to his monk-like
cell, he gradually gathered the choicest specimens of his collection.
The damps were expelled by fires on grateless hearthstones; sunshine
admitted from windows now for the first time exchanging boards for
glass; rough iron sconces, made at the nearest forge, were thrust into
the walls, and sometimes lighted at night-Darrell and Fairthorn walking
arm-in-arm along the unpolished floors, in company with Holbein's
Nobles, Perugino's Virgins. Some of that highbred company displaced
and banished the next day, as repeated inspection made the taste
more rigidly exclusive. Darrell had found object, amusement,
occupation--frivolous if Compared with those lenses, and glasses, and
algebraical scrawls which had once whiled lonely hours in the attic-room
hard by; but not frivolous even to the judgment of the austerest sage,
if that sage had not reasoned away his heart. For here it was not
Darrell's taste that was delighted; it was Darrell's heart that, ever
hungry, had found food. His heart was connecting those long-neglected
memorials of an ambition baffled and relinquished--here with a nation,
there with his father's grave! How his eyes sparkled! how his lip
smiled! Nobody would have guessed it--none of us know each other; least
of all do we know the interior being of those whom we estimate by public
repute;--but what a world of simple, fond affection lay coiled and
wasted in that proud man's solitary breast!

CHAPTER II.

THE LEARNED COMPUTE THAT SEVEN HUNDRED AND SEVEN MILLIONS OF
MILLIONS OF VIBRATIONS HAVE PENETRATED THE EYE BEFORE THE EYE CAN
DISTINGUISH THE TINTS OF A VIOLET. WHAT PHILOSOPHY CAN CALCULATE
THE VIBRATIONS OF THE HEART BEFORE IT CAN DISTINGUISH THE COLOURS OF
LOVE?

While Guy Darrell thus passed his hours within the unfinished fragments
of a dwelling builded for posterity, and amongst the still relics of
remote generations, Love and Youth were weaving their warm eternal idyll
on the sunny lawns by the gliding river.

There they are, Love and Youth, Lionel and Sophy, in the arbour round
which her slight hands have twined the honeysuckle, fond imitation of
that bower endeared by the memory of her earliest holiday--she seated
coyly, he on the ground at her feet, as when Titania had watched his
sleep. He has been reading to her, the book has fallen from his hand.
What book? That volume of poems so unintelligibly obscure to all but the
dreaming young,