Thou, too, could'st watch and weep!
MRS. HEMANS.

While Sir William Brandon was pursuing his ambitious schemes, and,
notwithstanding Lucy's firm and steady refusal of Lord Mauleverer, was
still determined on that ill-assorted marriage; while Mauleverer himself
day after day attended at the judge's house, and, though he spoke not of
love, looked it with all his might,--it became obvious to every one but
the lover and the guardian, that Lucy herself was rapidly declining in
appearance and health. Ever since the day she had last seen Clifford,
her spirits, before greatly shattered, had refused to regain even a
likeness to their naturally cheerful and happy tone. She became silent
and abstracted; even her gentleness of temper altered at times into a
moody and fretful humour. Neither to books nor music, nor any art by
which time is beguiled, she recurred for a momentary alleviation of the
bitter feelings at her heart, or for a transient forgetfulness of their
sting. The whole world of her mind had been shaken. Her pride was
wounded, her love galled; her faith in Clifford gave way at length to
gloomy and dark suspicion. Nothing, she now felt, but a name as well as
fortunes utterly abandoned, could have justified him for the stubbornness
of heart in which he had fled and deserted her. Her own self-acquittal
no longer consoled her in affliction. She condemned herself for her
weakness, from the birth of her ill-starred affection to the crisis it
had now acquired. "Why did I not wrestle with it at first?" she said
bitterly. "Why did I allow myself so easily to love one unknown to me,
and equivocal in station, despite the cautions of my uncle and the
whispers of the world?" Alas! Lucy did not remember that at the time she
was guilty of this weakness, she had not learned to reason as she since
reasoned. Her faculties were but imperfectly awakened; her experience of
the world was utter ignorance. She scarcely knew that she loved, and she