JANE SINCLAIR;

OR, THE FAWN OF SPRINGVALE.


By William Carleton




PART I.


If there be one object in life that stirs the current of human feeling
more sadly than another, it is a young and lovely woman, whose intellect
has been blighted by the treachery of him on whose heart, as on a
shrine, she offered up the incense of her first affection. Such a being
not only draws around her our tenderest and most delicate sympathies,
but fills us with that mournful impression of early desolation,
resembling so much the spirit of melancholy romance that arises from
one of those sad and gloomy breezes which sweep unexpectedly over the
sleeping surface of a summer lake, or moans with a tone of wail and
sorrow through the green foliage of the wood under whose cooling shade
we sink into our noon-day dream. Madness is at all times a thing of
fearful mystery, but when it puts itself forth in a female gifted with
youth and beauty, the pathos it causes becomes too refined for the
grossness of ordinary sorrow--almost transcends our notion of the
real, and assumes that wild interest which invests it with the dim and
visionary light of the ideal. Such a malady constitutes the very romance
of affliction, and gives to the fair sufferer rather the appearance of