Thus pity wak'd the tender thought; And, by her sweet persuasion led, To seize the hermit flower I sought, And bear her from her stony bed. I sought, but sudden on mine ear A voice in hollow murmurs broke, And smote my heart with holy fearThe Genius of the Ruin spoke. "From thee be far th' ungentle deel, The honours of the dead to spoil, Or take the sole remaining meed, The flower that crowns the former toil! "Nor deem that flower the garden's foe, Or fond to grace this barren shade; "Tis nature tells her to bestow Her honours on the lonely dead. "For this, obedient zephyrs bear Her light seeds round yon turret's mould, And undispers'd by tempests there, They rise in vegetable gold. "Nor shall thy wonder wake to see Such desert scenes distinction crave; "Where longs to fall that rifted spire, "When that, too, shades the trembling ground, Startles-how still their hearts will lie! "Of them who, wrapp'd in earth so cold, No more the smiling day shall view, Should many a tender tale be told; For many a tender thought is due. "Hast thou not seen some lover pale, When ev'ning brought the pensive hour, Step slowly o'er the shadowy vale, And stop to pluck the frequent flower? "Those flowers he surely meant to strew On lost affection's lowly cell, Tho' there, as fond remembrance grew,Forgotten from his hand they fell. "Has not for thee the fragrant thorn Been taught her first rose to resign? With vain but pious fondness borne, To deck thy Nancy's honour'd shine! "Tis nature pleading in the breast, Fair memory of her works to find; And when to fate she yields the rest, She claims the monumental mind. "Why, else, the o'ergrown paths of time AT THE SHRINE. Teresa Berini was the daughter of an innkeeper in one of the little villages that lie along the foot of the Sabine Hills. She had been a gay and spirited young woman, and had had her own share of lovers. Had she been as conscientious in confessing the peccadilloes which she had slid into by the necessity for what she had come to deem a little guileless deceit towards rivals, as she was in acknowledging terribly vicious thoughts and desires, she would have been at confession even oftener than she was. The priest, Padre Androvi, a shrewd and active man, who knew more about the affairs of the young women of the village than he chose to acknowledge in their hearing, would sit with eyes apparently confession, only now and then putting a quiet half-closed, as in a dream, listening to Teresa's question calculated to draw forth more detailed admissions. At length he would wind up by saying to her— My daughter, such thoughts as these come to all of us unbidden. If we entertain them not, the church, like a good mother, freely absolves without rebuke. It is only when they are hospitably provided for, and try to pay us for such entertainment as we give them by urging us to falseness or cruelty of act or word, that they are in danger of becoming deadly. Go in peace, my daughter, and forget not to pray for counsel and help to our sacred mother Mary." Now, over and over again had the padre dismissed Teresa in this wise. And she would go straight from confession to deceive a lover: for it must be known that, as the daughter of Jacopo Berini, she was esteemed a prize worth striving for among the young men of the district. Jacopo having conducted the inn with shrewdness and economy for nearly half a lifetime, and having at the same time looked very sharply after a mulberry-yard, and always sold his silk well, was a man of some means; and Teresa herself was attractive. Her eyes were dark and sparkling, as Italian women's are wont to be, but they had a softness that gave a peculiar depth to their charm; her features, though not too pronounced, were well formed, and her skin was fairer than is usual with Italian women. And she was not only attractive, but clever. Ever since her mother's death, which had taken place some ten years before in giving birth to a second daughter, Teresa had looked after the domestic arrangements, and the prospect was that the man she accepted would succeed her father in the inn. So it is not to be wondered at that at fair and festa, or at harvest or vintage-gathering, her hand was greatly in request; and many were the offerings of flowers and fruits that were brought to her. But of her admirers there were two more noted than all the restPaolo Benzi, the village blacksmith, and Carlo Speni, the mule-driver between the village and the city. Carlo had been her friend from childhood; but Paolo had come from the Neapolitan side a few years before, and had settled in the village. Now, though Carlo was favoured by the father, Teresa loved Paolo. But she hated the thought of vexing her father, and her devotion to him encouraged her in her deceptions. Her secret thoughts and her uunoticed smiles were all for Paolo; but she had to make feint of openly wooing Carlo, hard as it was for her. Often as she went singing about her work, while her father sat thinking what a fine pair she and Carlo would make, she was thinking sadly to herself, in spite of all her outward cheer, "I know what's in his head; but for all that I know at the same time I shall never marry Carlo;" and a sigh would steal from her in the pauses of her song. Of course it could not wholly escape Carlo that she looked on his rival, the blacksmith, with favour; but he flattered himself that the authority of the father would be enough to secure success to his suit in the long run. So he waited, but he could not help watching; for when was lover in such circumstances ever without jealousy? But Paolo waited and watched likewise, for love made him determined; and the sweet consciousness that he was loved rendered him strong and resolute. So one evening he wandered up the hill behind the village by a road to a vineyard, which he knew that Teresa was wont to visit. He sauntered leisurely along, not taking much notice of the beauty of the olives and the wild vines that festooned the way; and at length he sat himself down under a mulberry-tree to rest. He had not sat long when he saw Teresa round a corner of VOL. I. the road; but, to his great chagrin, Carlo was with her, carrying her basket and smiling down on her. Paolo was stung as he had never been before, and crept round to the other side of the tree to hide, and gathered himself together with a muttered curse. They came on slowly, as though they were both concerned to prolong the journey-to make each step take as much time as possible; and Paolo could hear snatches of their conversation-only snatches, for if he had heard the whole he might have taken consolation instead of vowing revenge. 'No doubt you do," said he; "but one wants a change. I always think more of the village when I have been longer away than usual." Men are maybe different," said Teresa; "I have no wish for changes." "Tis good to be content," said he; "I know I won't be content till I have you for my own-my very own;" and then he kissed her just as they passed the tree which concealed Paolo. She blushed, though so far as she knew there was no eye to see, and made feint to put a step's space between them; but, recalling the need for appearances, she drew closer again and whispered Women's love is different from men's love, I think, Carlo: it likes to wait and feel each day that it is growing." "It may be," said Carlo; "but if love grows by waiting, how have we ourselves got here?" and he smiled at his own remark. Teresa laughed also; and they two went on; and, as they disappeared, Paolo heard the silvery echoes of their laughter. He crept down the hill behind them, like some ominous shadow. Instead of going home, he opened his workshop; and, on pretext of being busy, began to work again, and puffed and blew and hainmered till the people wondered what on earth had come to the blacksmith. Paolo was that night doing more than forging vine-rods. Things went on for a while without change: Paolo saw Teresa occasionally; for sometimes he would go to the inn with a farmer who had come to the village to settle accounts with him; and then he always took heart of grace, for he read love for him in Teresa's eyes in spite of 21 her attempts at womanly disguises. But neither to her nor her father did he say aught of what lay so near his heart. him, was returning home, and had got within a few miles of the village, when he was set upon by the brigands, his treasure taken from him, and he himself stabbed in various places, and left for dead on the way. He certainly would have died had not a friendly shepherd found him and carried him to the nearest farmhouse, from whence he was in time taken home. Months passed on and the winter came. One evening the village was thrown into great consternation by the arrival of one of Carlo's mules that had evidently broken away from its master in some great danger. As on that occasion Carlo was carrying commodities of more than ordinary value, it was presumed He was so seriously wounded, that there that he had been carried off by brigands; and was no hope that he would ever be able to go that in a short time he would return. But about again. And as he lay thus faint from weeks passed on, till they grew to months, pain and loss of blood, a child was born to and still no word of Carlo. Jacopo and others, Teresa. At the first blush she knew it all— who had loved and respected him, had caused how Paolo, for love of her, had terribly wronged all sorts of inquiries to be made, and had Carlo, and how now Carlo had revenged himoffered rewards, but with no effect. And self upon them both. She felt that she had gradually Paolo had thrown himself into sinned in making a pretence of love even to Jacopo's way, till at length the latter was please her father, and blamed herself sorely forced to own that Paolo was clever and dis- for being the cause of all the evil by having creet, and, as all hope of Carlo's return had been deceitful. The thought of all this soon now passed, he was not averse to his becoming bred a change in her. She grew serious and a sweetheart to Teresa. There was no need thoughtful; and whilst ministering to Paolo's for a long wooing; and they two were wedded needs, would speak to him of religion. Now, within a year and a half from the time that when she went to confession, the padre did Paolo had sat under the mulberry-tree and not dismiss her with the old style of words; muttered his curses. but would say to her tenderly: But, in spite of their love for each other, Paolo and Teresa were not so happy as they had told themselves that they would be. There was a something that lay between them unspoken-a something only guessed at, but dark and gloomy, and it distressed them. Paolo would mutter in his sleep, and Carlo's name could be clearly heard in the mutterings; for now Paolo was haunted by a great fear. The robbers whom Paolo had bribed with all his savings of these half-dozen years to rid him of a rival, had done more than he had bargained for, they had compelled Carlo to go with them in a very adventurous expedition which was not so successfully carried through as most of their enterprises; and he was seen and described, and orders were sent to try and apprehend him as one of the leaders of the brigands. So it was not safe for him, as he conceived, to show himself in the village; and when he heard that Paolo had married Teresa, he grimly accepted his hard fate, and was even consoled by the thought that some day it would give him the better chance of revenge. And his chance came sooner than he had hoped. A relative of Paolo in the Neapolitan territory had died, leaving him his money, and it became necessary that Paolo should go there to arrange matters. He performed his journey safely, and, having realized the wealth that had been left 66 My daughter, trials like these are hard to bear, and little sins sometimes bring heavy burdens; but you did it hoping to save your father's peace, and the saints will not judge you so hardly as you judge yourself. Go in peace, and forget not to ask help of our sacred mother Mary. She is always ready to succour such as you are, and to pour the oil of consolation into such wounds as yours." And often in the bright Italian afternoons, Teresa was to be seen, accompanied by her little sister Beatrice, carrying her baby up the valley to where, at the ruined convent, there was a shrine, as there is in many remote as well as in the most frequented corners of Italy. To these shrines all classes of people repair, to implore the intercession of the Madonna for themselves and those who are dear to them. At the shrine Teresa bestowed simple gifts, and begged mercy for herself and a blessing for the child who had been born to her in such sad circumstances. All the people in the district knew her story, and knew her habit of going daily to the convent shrine, where she would linger for hours. They pitied and sympathized with her sorrow, for she who was so late the petted beauty had now become a gentle and devout woman. Carlo escaped to France, and was never heard of again. Paolo was crippled for life. B. ORME Within yon forest is a gloomy glen— Each tree which guards its darkness from the day Waves o'er a warrior's tomb. PEACE AND WAR How beautiful this night! the balmiest sigh, That wraps this moveless scene. Heaven's ebon vault, Through which the moon's unc ouded grandeur rolls, A metaphor of peace;-all form a scene Ah! whence yon glare Hark to that roar, whose swift and deafening peals The gray morn Dawns on the mournful scene; the sulphurous smoke Of the outsallying victors: far behind Black ashes note where their proud city stood. PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY. TRIFLES. [Hannah More. born at Stapleton, Gloucestershire, 1745; died 7th September, 1833. One of the most prominent of authors at the beginning of this century. She was the daughter of a schoolmaster, and at the age of seventeen she published her first work, a pastoral drama, entitled The Search efter Happiness. This attracted considerable attention, and in the following year she produced The Inflexible Captive, a tragedy. Two of her tragedies-Percy and The Fatal Falsehood-were brought out by Garrick at Drury Lane. Johnson greatly admired her works, and considered her the best of the female poets. She early directed her genins to the high task of conveying religious instruction in prose and verse, and in this she was eminently successful. The following couplets will show how epigrammatic she could be at times: "In men this blunder still you find, She was one of the few authors who have made a fortune by their craft. She made about £30,000 by her writings, and bequeathed a third of that sum to various charitable institutions. In 1782 appeared her Sacred Dramas and a poem entitled Sensibility, from which we take our extract.] Since trifles make the sum of human things, God gives its counterpoise to every ill; Nor let us mur:nur at our stinted powers, When kindness, love, and concord may be ours. The gift of minist'ring to others' ease, Which clouds the colour of domestic life; On these small cares of daughter, wife, and friend, ROUGE-ET-NOIR. [Horace Smith, born in London, 1779; died 12th July, 1849. He was the author of about twenty novels, the best known of which are Brambletye House, Jane Lomax, and Th: Moneyed Man. In conjunction with his brother James, he wrote the Rejected Addresses, which obtained great popularity. He was a profuse miscellaneous writer of prose and verse, possessed of much humour. The following sketch is from Guieties and Gravities, which was first published in 1826, 3 vols.] -Could I forget What I have been, I might the better bear SOUTHERN. Never shall I forget that accursed 27th of September: it is burned in upon the tablet of my memory; graven in letters of blood upon my heart. I look back to it with a strangely compounded feeling of horror and delight; of horror at the black series of wretched days and sleepless nights of which it was the fatal precursor; of delight at that previous career of tranquillity and self-respect which it was destined to terminate-alas, for ever! Varietes, whose small theatre, as well as its saloons and labyrinths, are haunted by a set of sirens not less dangerous than the nymphs who assailed Ulysses. Emerging from these haunts, we found that a heavy shower was falling; and while we paraded once more the stone gallery, my friend suddenly exclaimed, as his eye fell upon the numbers of the houses -"one hundred and fifty-four! positively we are going away without visiting one of the gaming-houses was the meaning of the term he employed, though he expressed it by a word that the fashionable preacher never mentioned to "ears polite."-"I have never yet entered," said I, “a pandemonium of this sort, and I never will:-I refrain from it upon principle: -Principiis obsta;' I am of Dr. Johnson's temperament, I can practise abstinence, but not temperance; and everybody knows that prevention is better than cure."—"Do you remember," replied E, "what the same Dr. Johnson said to Boswell-'My dear sir, clear your mind of cant;' I do not ask you to play; but you must have often read, when you were a good little boy, that 'vice to be hated needs but to be seen,' and cannot have forgotten that the Spartans sometimes made their slaves drunk and showed them to their children to inculcate sobriety. Love of virtue is best On that day I had been about a fortnight in secured by a hatred of its opposite: to hate it Paris, and in passing through the garden of you must see it: besides, a man of the world the Palais Royal, had stopped to admire the should see everything." "But it is so disrebeautiful jet-d'eau in its centre, on which the putable," I rejoined.-"How completely John sunbeams were falling so as to produce a small Bullish!" exclaimed E--. "Disreputable! rainbow, when I was accosted by my o'd friend why I am going to take you to an establishMajor E, of the Fusileers. After the first ment recognized, regulated, and taxed by the surprises and salutations, as he found that the government, the upholders of religion and business of procuring apartments and settling social order, who annually derive six millions my family had prevented my seeing many of of franes from this source of revenue; and as the Parisian lions, he offered himself as my to the company, I promise you that you shall cicerone, proposing that we should begin by encounter men of the first respectability, of making the circuit of the building that sur- all sects and parties, for in France every one rounded us. With its history and the remark- gambles at these saloons,-except the devotees. able events of which it had been the scene I and they play at home."-He took my arm. was already conversant; but of its detail and and I walked upstairs with him, merely ejacuappropriation, which, as he assured me, consti-lating as we reached the door-" Mind, I don't tuted its sole interest in the eyes of the Parisians, play. I was completely ignorant. After taking a cursory view of most of the sights above ground in this multifarious pile, I was conducted to some of its subterraneous wonders, to the Cafe du Sauvage, where a man is hired for six francs a night to personate that character, by beating a great drum with all the grinning, ranting, and raving of a madman:-to the Cafe des Aveugles, whose numerous orchestra is entirely composed of blind men and women;-and to the Cafe des Entering an ante-room, we were received by two or three servants, who took our sticks and hats, for which we received tickets, and by the number suspended around I perceived that there was a tolerably numerous attendance within. Roulette was the game to which the first chamber was dedicated. In the middle of a long green table was a circular excavation, resembling a large gilt basin, in whose centre was a rotatory apparatus turning an ivory ball in a groove, which, after sundry gyrations, |