In fact his parents lived under a sleepless dread of losing him which kept their hearts expanded with that inexpressible and burning love which none but a parent so circumstanced can ever feel.  Alas! notwithstanding the promise of life which early years usually hold out, there was much to justify them in this their sad and gloomy apprehension.  Woeful was the uncertainty which they felt in discriminating between the natural bloom of youth and the beauty of that fatal malady which they dreaded.  His tall slender frame, his transparent cheek, so touching, so unearthly in the fairness of its expression; the delicacy of his whole organization, both mental and physical—­all, all, with the terror of decline in their hearts, spoke as much of despair as of hope, and placed the life and death of their beloved boy in an equal poise.

But, independently of his extraordinary personal advantages, all his dispositions were so gentle and affectionate, that it was not I in human nature to entertain harsh feeling toward him.  Although modest and shrinking, even to diffidence, he possessed a mind full of intellect and enthusiasm:  his imagination, too, overflowed with creative power, and sought the dreamy solitudes of noon, that it might, far from the bustle of life, shadow forth those images of beauty which come thickly only upon those whose hearts are most susceptible of its forms.  Many a time has he sat alone upon the brow of a rock or hill, watching the clouds of heaven, or gazing on the setting sun, or communing with the thousand aspects of nature in a thousand moods, his young spirit relaxed into that elysian reverie which, beyond all other kinds of intellectual enjoyment, is the most seductive to a youth of poetic temperament.

There were, indeed, in Osborne’s case, too many of those light and scarcely perceptible tokens which might be traced, if not to a habit of decline, at least to a more than ordinary delicacy of constitution.  The short cough, produced by the slightest damp, or the least breath of ungenial air—­the varying cheek, now rich as purple, and again pale as a star of heaven—­the unsteady pulse, and the nervous sense of uneasiness without a cause—­all these might be symptoms of incipient decay, or proofs of those fine impulses which are generally associated with quick sensibility and genius.  Still they existed; at one time oppressing the hearts of his parents with fear, and again exalting them with pride.  The boy was consequently enjoined to avoid all violent exercise, to keep out of Currents, while heated to drink nothing cold, and above all things never to indulge in the amusement of cold bathing.

Such were the circumstances under which Osbome first appeared to the reader, who may now understand the extent of his alarm on feeling himself so suddenly and seriously affected by his generosity in rescuing the wounded dove.  His mere illness on this occasion was a matter of much less anxiety to himself than the alarm which he knew it would occasion his parents and sister.  On his reaching home he mentioned the incident which occurred, admitted that he had been rather warm on going into the water, and immediately went to bed.  Medical aid was forthwith procured, and although the physician assured them that there appeared nothing serious in his immediate state, yet was his father’s house a house of wail and sorrow.