might in the sanctity of unreproving nature cherish her affection for the youth whose image was ever, ever before her.  At home such was the timid delicacy of her love, that she felt as if its indulgence even in the stillest depths of her own heart, was disturbed by the conversation of her kindred, and the familiar habits of domestic life.  Her father’s, her brother’s, and her sisters’ voices, produced in her a feeling of latent shame, which, when she supposed for a moment that they could guess her attachment, filled her with anxiety and confusion.  She experienced besides a sense of uneasiness on reflecting that she practiced, for the first time in their presence, a dissimulation so much at variance with the opinion she knew they entertained of her habitual candor.  It was, in fact, the first secret she had ever concealed from them; and now the suppression of it in her own bosom made her feel as if she had withdrawn that confidence which was due to the love they bore her.  This was what kept her so much in her own room, or sent her abroad to avoid all that had a tendency to repress the indulgence of an attachment that had left in her heart a capacity for no other enjoyment.  But in solitude she was far from every thing that could disturb those dreams in which the tranquility of nature never failed to entrance her.  There was where the mysterious spirit that raises the soul above the impulses of animal life, mingled with her being—­and poured upon her affection the elemental purity of that original love which in the beginning preceded human guilt.

It is, indeed, far from the contamination of society—­in the stillness of solitude when the sentiment of love comes abroad before its passion, that the heart can be said to realize the object of its devotion, and to forget that its indulgence can ever be associated with error.  This is, truly, the angelic love of youth and innocence; and such was the nature of that which the beautiful girl felt.  Indeed, her clay was so divinely tempered, that the veil which covered her pure and ethereal spirit, almost permitted the light within to be visible, and exhibited the workings of a soul that struggled to reach the object whose communion with itself seemed to constitute the sole end of its existence.

The evening on which Jane and Charles Osborne met for the first time, unaccompanied by their friends, was one of those to which the power of neither pen nor pencil can do justice.  The sun was slowly sinking among a pile of those soft crimson clouds, behind which fancy is so apt to picture to itself the regions of calm delight that are inhabited by the happy spirits of the blest; the sycamore and hawthorn were yet musical with the hum of bees, busy in securing their evening burthen for the hive.  Myriads of winged insects were sporting in the sunbeams; the melancholy plaint of the ringdove came out sweetly from the trees, mingled with the songs of other birds, and the still sweeter voice of some happy groups of