children at play in the distance.  The light of the hour, in its subdued but golden tone, fell with singular clearness upon all nature, giving to it that tranquil beauty which makes every thing the eye rests upon glide with quiet rapture into the heart.  The moth butterflies were fluttering over the meadows, and from the low stretches of softer green rose the thickly-growing grass-stalks, laying their slender ear’s bent with the mellow burthen of wild honey—­the ambrosial feast for the lips of innocence and childhood.  It was, indeed, an evening when love would bring forth its sweetest memories, and dream itself into those ecstacies of tenderness that flow from the mingled sensations of sadness and delight.

It would be difficult, perhaps impossible, to see on this earth a young creature, whose youth and beauty, and slender grace of person gave her more the appearance of some visionary spirit, too exquisitely ideal for human life.  Indeed, she seemed to be tinted with the hues of heaven, and never did a mortal being exist in such fine and harmonious keeping with the scene in which she moved.  So light and sylph-like was her figure, though tall, that the eye almost feared she would dissolve from before it, and leave nothing to gaze at but the earth on which she trod.  Yet was there still apparent in her something that preserved, with singular power, the delightful reality that she was of humanity, and subject to all those softer influences that breathe their music so sweetly over the chords of the human heart.  The delicate bloom of her cheek, shaded away as it was, until it melted into the light that sparkled from her complexion—­the snowy forehead, the flashing eye, in which sat the very soul of love—­the lips, blushing of sweets—­her whole person breathing the warmth of youth, and feeling, and so characteristic in the easiness of its motions of that gracile flexibility that has never been known to exist separate from the power of receiving varied and profound emotions—­all this told the spectator, too truly, that the lovely being before him was not of another sphere, but one of the most delightful that ever appeared in this.

But hush!—­here is a strain of music!  Oh! what lips breathed forth that gush of touching melody which flows in such linked sweetness from the flute of an unseen performer?  How soft, how gentle, but oh, how very mournful are the notes!  Alas! they are steeped in sorrow, and melt away in the plaintive cadences of despair, until they mingle with silence.  Surely, surely, they come from one whose heart has been brought low by the ruined hopes of an unrequited passion.  Yes, fair girl, thou at least dost so interpret them; but why this sympathy in one so young?  Why is thy bright eye dewy with tears for the imaginary sorrows of another?  And again—­but ha!—­why that flash of delight and terror?—­that sudden suffusion of red over thy face and neck—­and even now, that paleness like death!  Thy heart, thy heart—­why does it throb, and why do thy knees totter?  Alas! it is even so; the Endymion of thy dreams, as beautiful as even thou thyself in thy purple dawn of womanhood,—­he from whom thou now shrinkest, yet whom thou dreadest not to meet, is approaching, and bears in his beauty the charm that will darken thy destiny.