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 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