dently over the vale, before it was restored to its wonted solitary silence. Glorvina has made the plea of a head-ache these two mornings back, for playing the truant at her drawingdesk; but the fact is, her days and nights are devoted to the sentimental sorcery of Rousseau; and the ef fects of her studies are visible in her eyes. When we meet, their glance sinks beneath the ardour of mine, in soft confusion: her manner is no longer childishly playful, or carelessly indifferent, and sometimes a sigh, scarce breathed, is discovered by the blush which glows on her cheek for the inadvertency of her lip. Does she then begin to feel she has a heart? Does "Le besoin de l'ame tendre,” already throb with vague emotion in her bosom? Her abstracted air, her delicious melancholy, her unusual softness, betray the nature of the feelings by which she is overwhelmed-they are new to herself; and sometimes I fancy, when she turns her melting eyes on me, it is to solicit their meaning. O! if I dared become the interpreter between her and her heartif I dared indulge myself in the hope, the belief, that And what then? 'Tis all folly, 'tis madness, 'tis worse! But who ever yet rejected the blessing for which his soul thirsted?And in the scale of human felicities, if there is one in which all others are summed up-above all others supremely elevated-it is the consciousness of having awakened the first sentiment of the sweetest, the sublimest of all human passions, in the bosom of youth, genius, and sensibility. Feb, 18744 184 THE WILD IRISH GIRL. LETTER XX. TO J. D. ESQ. M. P. I HAD just finished my last by the beams of a gioriously setting sun, when I was startled by a pebble being thrown in at my window. I looked out, and perceived Father John in the act of flinging up another, which the hand of Glorvina (who was leaning on his arm) prevented. "If you are not engaged in writing to your mistress," said he, "come down and join us in a ramble." "And though I were," I replied, "I could not resist your challenge." And down I flew-Glorvina laughing, sent me back for my hat, and we proceeded on our walk. "This is an evening," said I, looking at Glorvina, "worthy of the morning of the first of May, and we have seized it in that happy moment so exquisitely described by Collins : "While now the bright hair'd sun Sits in yon western tent, whose cloudy skirts, O'erhang his wavy bed." "O! that beautiful Ode!" exclaimed Glorvina, with all her wildest enthusiasm-" never can I read, --never hear it repeated, but with emotion. The perusal of Ossian's Song of other Times,' the breezy respiration of my harp at twilight, the last pale rose that outlives its season, and bears on its faded breast the frozen tears of the wintry dawn, and Collins' Ode to Evening, awaken in my heart_and fancy the same train of indescribable feeling, of exquisite yet unspeakable sensation. Alas! the solitary pleasure of feeling thus alone the utter impossibility of conveying to the bosom of another those ecstatic emotions by which our own is sublimed.” While my very soul followed this brilliant comet to her perihelium of sentiment and imagination, I fixed my eyes on her "mind-illumin'd face," and said, "And is expression then necessary for the conveyance of such profound, such exquisite feeling ?-May not a similarity of refined organization exist between souls, and produce that mutual intelligence which sets the necessity of cold verbal expression at defiance? May not the sympathy of a kindred sensibility in the bosom of another, meet and enjoy those delicious feelings by which yours is warmed, and sinking beneath the inadequacy of language to give them birth, feel like you in silent and sacred emotion?" "Perhaps," said the priest, with his usual simplicity, "this sacred sympathy, between two refined, elevated, and sensible souls, in the sublime and beautiful of the moral and natural world, approaches nearer to the rapturous and pure emotions which uncreated spirits may be supposed to feel in their heavenly communion, than any other human sentiment with which we are acquainted." For all the looks of blandishments which ever flung. their spell from beauty's eye, I would not have exchanged the glance which Glorvina at that moment cast on me. While the priest, who seemed to have been following up the train of thought awakened by our preceding observations, abruptly added, after a silence of some minutes "There is a species of metaphorical taste, if I may be allowed the expression, whose admiration for certain objects is not deducible from the established rules of beauty, order, or even truth; which should be the basis of our approbation; yet which ever brings with it a sensation of more lively pleasure; as for instance, a chromatic passion in music, will awaken a thrill of delight which a simple chord could never effect." "Nor would the most self-evident truth," said I, "awaken so vivid a sensation, as when we find some sentiment of the soul illustrated by some law or principle in science. To an axiom we announce our assent, but we lavish our most enthusiastic approbation when Rousseau tells us that, Les ames humaines veulent être accomplies pour valoir toute leurs-prix, et la force unie des ames comme celles des larmes d'un aimant artificiel, est incomparablement plus grands que la somme de leurs force particulier.” As this quotation was meant all for Glorvina, I looked earnestly at her as I repeated it. A crimson torrent rushed to her cheek, and convinced me that she felt the full force of a sentiment so applicable to us both. "And why," said I, addressing her in a low voice, "was Rousseau excluded from the sacred coalition with Ossian, Collins, your twilight harp, and winter rose ? Glorvina made no reply; but turned full on me her eyes of dewy light." Mine almost sunk beneath the melting ardour of their soul-beaming glance. Oh! child of Nature! child of genius and passion! why was I withheld from throwing myself at thy feet; from offering thee the homage of that soul thou hast awakened; from covering thy hands with my kisses, and bathing them with tears of such delicious emotion, as thou only hast power to inspire? While we thus "buvames à longs traits le philtre dé 'amour," Father John gradually restored us to common-place existence, by a common place conversation on the fineness of the weather, promising aspect of the season, &c. until the moon, as it rose sublimely above the summit of the mountain, called forth the melting tones of my Glorvina's syren voice. Casting up her eyes to that heaven whence they seem to have caught their emanation, she said, "I do not wonder that unenlighted nations should worship the moon. Our ideas are so intimately connected with our senses, so ductilely transferable from cause to ef fect, that the abstract thought may readily subside in the sensible image which awakens it. When, in the awful stilness of a calm night, I fix my eyes on that mild and beautiful orb, the created has become the awakening medium of that adoration I offered to the Creator." "Yes," said the priest," I remember, that even in your childhood, you used to fix your eyes on the moon, and gaze and wonder. I believe it would have been no difficult matter to have plunged you back in the heathenism of your ancestors, and to have made it one of the gods of your idolatry." "And was the chaste Luna in the album sanctorum of your Druidical mythology?" said I. "Undoubtedly," said the priest, "we read in the life of our celebrated saint, St. Columba, that on the alter-piece of a Druidical temple, the sun, moon and stars, were curiously depicted; and the form of the ancient Irish oath of allegiance, was to swear by the sun, moon and stars, and other deities, celestial as well as terrestrial." "How," said I, "did your mythology touch so closely on that of the Greeks? had you also your Pans and your Daphnes, as well as your Dians and Apollos ?" "Here is a curious anecdote that evinces it," returned the priest―" it is many years since I read it in a black-letter memoir of St. Patrick. The Saint, says the biographer, attended by three bishops and some less dignified of his brethren, being in this very province, arose early one morning, and with his pious associates placed himself near a fountain or well, and began to chaunt a hymn. In the neighbourhood of this honoured fountain, stood the palace of Cruachan, where the two daughters of the Emperor Laogaire were, educating in retirement; and as the saints sung by no means sotto voce,* their pious strains caught the at *A musical voice was an indispensable quality in an Irish Saint, and lungs of leather no trivial requisite towards obtaining canonization. St. Columbkill, we are told, sung so loud, that, according to an old Irish poem, called Amhra Choilluim chille, or the Vision of Columbkill, "His hallow'd voice beyond a mile was heard." |