the enthusiastic correspondent revealed in the gifted beauty; and the
gloomy circumstances connected with her early fate had left deep furrows
in his memory. Time and vicissitude had effaced the wounds, and the
Light of the Beautiful dawned once more in the face of Evelyn. Valerie
de Ventadour had been but the fancy of a roving breast. Alice, the sweet
Alice!--her, indeed, in the first flower of youth, he had loved with a
boy's romance. He had loved her deeply, fondly,--but perhaps he had
never been in love with her; he had mourned her loss for
years,--insensibly to himself her loss had altered his character and cast
a melancholy gloom over all the colours of his life. But she whose range
of ideas was so confined, she who had but broke into knowledge, as the
chrysalis into the butterfly--how much in that prodigal and gifted
nature, bounding onwards into the broad plains of life, must the peasant
girl have failed to fill! They had had nothing in common but their youth
and their love. It was a dream that had hovered over the poet-boy in the
morning twilight,--a dream he had often wished to recall, a dream that
had haunted him in the noon-day,--but had, as all boyish visions ever
have done, left the heart unexhausted, and the passions unconsumed!
Years, long years, since then had rolled away, and yet, perhaps, one
unconscious attraction that drew Maltravers so suddenly towards Evelyn
was a something indistinct and undefinable that reminded him of Alice.
There was no similarity in their features; but at times a tone in
Evelyn's voice, a "trick of the manner," an air, a gesture, recalled him,
over the gulfs of Time, to Poetry, and Hope, and Alice.

In the youth of each--the absent and the present one--there was
resemblance,--resemblance in their simplicity, their grace. Perhaps
Alice, of the two, had in her nature more real depth, more ardour of
feeling, more sublimity of sentiment, than Evelyn. But in her primitive
ignorance half her noblest qualities were embedded and unknown. And