My soul its secret has, my life too has its mystery,
    A love eternal in a moment’s space conceived;
    Hopeless the evil is, I have not told its history,
    And she who was the cause, nor knew it, nor believed. 
    Alas!  I shall have passed close by her unperceived,
    Forever at her side, and yet forever lonely,
    I shall unto the end have made life’s journey, only
    Daring to ask for naught, and having naught received. 
    For her, though God has made her gentle and endearing,
    She will go on her way distraught and without hearing
    These murmurings of love that round her steps ascend,
    Piously faithful still unto her austere duty,
    Will say, when she shall read these lines full of her beauty,
    “Who can this woman be?” and will not comprehend.

A LEAF

FROM MY PARIS NOTE-BOOK.

BY H.T.  TUCKERMAN.

Fresh from Italy, we enter the gallery of the Louvre with a feeling that it is but a grand prolongation of the glorious array of pictured and sculptured trophies, scattered in such memorable luxuriance, through that chosen land of art; but the sensation is that of delightful surprise when we have but recently explored the dim chambers of the National Gallery, or obtained formal access to a private British collection.  To cross the now magnificent hall of Apollo, with its grand proportions flooded by a cloudless sun, expands the mind and brightens the vision for their feast of beauty.  Here too, a magic improvement has been recently wrought, and the architectural renovation lends new effect to the ancient treasures, so admirably preserved and arranged.  I stood long at one of the windows and looked down upon the Seine; it was thence that the people were fired upon at the massacre of St. Bartholomew; there rose, dark and fretted, the antique tower of Notre Dame, here was the site of the Tour de Nesle, that legend of crime wrought in stone; gracefully looked the bridges as they spanned the swollen current of the river; cheerfully lay the sunshine on quay and parapet; it was a scene where the glow of nature and the shadows of history unite to lend a charm to the panorama of modern civilization.  And turning the gaze within, how calm and refreshing seemed the long and high vistas of the gallery; how happy the artists at their easels;—­girls with their frugal dinners in a basket on the pavement, copying a Flemish scene; youths drawing intently some head of an old master; veterans of the palette reproducing the tints born under Venetian skies; and groups standing in silent admiration before some exquisite gem or wonderful conception.  It is like an audience with the peers of art to range the Louvre; in radiant state and majestic silence they receive their reverend guests; first smiles down upon him the celestial meekness of Raphael’s holy women, then the rustic truth of Murillo’s peasant mothers, and the most costly, though, to our