Yet, with a stern delight and strange,
    I saw the spirit-stirring change,
    As warr’d the wind with wave and wood,
    Upon the ruin’d tower I stood,
    And felt my heart more strongly bound,
    Responsive to the lofty sound,
    While, joying in the mighty roar,
    I mourn’d that tranquil scene no more.

    So, on the idle dreams of youth,
    Breaks the loud trumpet-call of truth,
    Bids each fair vision pass away,
    Like landscape on the lake that lay,
    As fair, as flitting, and as frail,
    As that which fled the Autumn gale.—­
    For ever dead to fancy’s eye
    Be each gay form that glided by,
    While dreams of love and lady’s charms
    Give place to honour and to arms!

In sober prose, as perhaps these verses intimate less decidedly, the transient idea of Miss Cecilia Stubbs passed from Captain Waverley’s heart amid the turmoil which his new destinies excited.  She appeared, indeed, in full splendour in her father’s pew upon the Sunday when he attended service for the last time at the old parish church, upon which occasion, at the request of his uncle and Aunt Rachel, he was induced (nothing both, if the truth must be told) to present himself in full uniform.

There is no better antidote against entertaining too high an opinion of others than having an excellent one of ourselves at the very same time.  Miss Stubbs had indeed summoned up every assistance which art could afford to beauty; but, alas! hoop, patches, frizzled locks, and a new mantua of genuine French silk, were lost upon a young officer of dragoons who wore for the first time his gold-laced hat, jack-boots, and broadsword.  I know not whether, like the champion of an old ballad,—­

    His heart was all on honour bent,
    He could not stoop to love;
    No lady in the land had power
    His frozen heart to move;

or whether the deep and flaming bars of embroidered gold, which now fenced his breast, defied the artillery of Cecilia’s eyes; but every arrow was launched at him in vain.

    Yet did I mark where Cupid’s shaft did light;
    It lighted not on little western flower,
    But on bold yeoman, flower of all the west,
    Hight Jonas Culbertfield, the steward’s son.

Craving pardon for my heroics (which I am unable in certain cases to resist giving way to), it is a melancholy fact, that my history must here take leave of the fair Cecilia, who, like many a daughter of Eve, after the departure of Edward, and the dissipation of certain idle visions which she had adopted, quietly contented herself with a pisaller, and gave her hand, at the distance of six months, to the aforesaid Jonas, son of the Baronet’s steward, and heir (no unfertile prospect) to a steward’s fortune, besides the snug probability of succeeding to his father’s office.  All these advantages moved Squire Stubbs, as much as the ruddy brown and manly form of the suitor