philarea, here grow to a size that they never elsewhere attain. The myrtle is seen clambering over the windows; and the China rose has, throughout the year, a constant succession of buds and flowers.

The group that gave occasion to my sombre apostrophe consisted of a father and his two daughters, whom I had met for some time in my rambles, and with whom I afterwards became acquainted. Would I had not! for the latter were doomed within a few months, to become victims to an hereditary malady that had proved fatal to their mother.

The father, at least sixty years of age, in his gait and air bore the appearance of what he had been-a soldier. He had served in the East Indies; and it might be perceived that, in common with other long residents in that country, he had not escaped the effects of its destructive climate, but that his constitution was much impaired. Some deep sorrow seemed imprinted on his fine and noble features, which had lately taken a still deeper shade, from a presentiment of evil,-a conviction that a premature fate menaced the lives of those dearer to him even than his own; that it hung suspended, like a sword by a single thread, over the heads of his daughters. They were drawn in chairs of a light and fragile form, which, as they sate, gave a peculiar elegance and grace to their attitude; being such as Canova, modelling from the antique, has chosen for one of his statues. The general was walking between them, and his eye turned occasionally from one to the other: neither spoke; his heart was too full to give utterance to his feelings; and to them, the effort would have been painful, even had they been permitted by their physician, to converse in the open air. They held at times their handkerchiefs-one was, I perceived, spotted with blood,-to their mouths, as though the atmosphere respired was too keen for their lacerated lungs. Now and then they interchanged glances, which seemed to be mutually understood; and I thought I could read in their countenances a sense of the loveliness of the scenery around them, a pleasure tinged with melancholy, whenever a ray of sunshine through some opening in the trees smiled on them. Then, too, they smiled; but it was a faint smile, like that of the March sun,—a mockery of joy.

Julia, the eldest, was a brunette: her figure was above the common height; and her hair, which she wore in long depending ringlets on each side of her face, was, like her eyes, black as jet.

Caroline, the youngest, in no way resembled her sister; and the singular contrast between them, a foil to the beauty of each, gained them the appellation of the Celestial and Terrestrial Hemispheres. Caroline had just attained that critical period of life when the girl gives place to the woman; she was in her seventeenth year. Like the shoot of some parasite plant that is scarcely able to support itself, thin, tall, and delicate was her form. For some months she had been unequal to walking, even for a few yards, without fatigue; and her father always carried in his hand a camp-seat, on which, whenever she had crawled out on the jettee, or to the strand, at every twenty or thirty yards she was obliged to rest; whilst Julia leaned affectionately over her, and watched every turn of her sister's changing countenance, her own sweet and angelic as that of some divine messenger sent to comfort a dying martyr. No murmur or complaint ever escaped Caroline's lips; nothing could be more affecting

than to see the effort she made to disguise her sufferings, in order to quiet the apprehensions of those beings whose lives hung upon hers.

I have said she was beautiful: what words can describe her love. liness it was that of an embodied spirit. In a portrait, such a complexion would have seemed the flattery of the art; enamel could give a faint idea of its clearness. its brilliancy, its transparency. It was pure as herself, the reflex of her soul without a taint of earth. Her eyes were what the Spaniards call adormidellos; an epithet the most endearing and significant, and which, for want of a diminutive in our language, admits of no synonyme. To make it intelligible by a paraphrase, I should say they were eyes which, under the veil of their long silken lashes, express, not that the soul is asleep, but dreaming of love,-divine rather than human love, for who was worthy of inspiring it? But when she raised those dark blue orbs, they shone with the light of genius, the fire of intelligence; and yet there was, at times, in them an unnatural lustre, like that of a lamp that burns the brighter as it is about to lose its vivifying oil. In proportion as the malady became more inveterate, her spirits increased; and the pure emanation of her mind seemed to throw a halo about her, making her look like an angel— with all, save wings, for heaven.

I saw, with a regret as if she had been my own sister, Death approach with stealthy pace, and foresaw that she would at last sink into his arms, calmly and peaceably as a child is hushed to slumber on its nurse's breast. And yet every day did her cheek assume a livelier hectic and a common observer would have fancied he observed symp. toms of convalescence; like the gala-day in the East, it was only a flattering revelation.

This contest between mind and matter, this strife between the powers of life and death, reminded me of a picture of Guido's,* representing a rosy infant lying on a winding-sheet, and playing with a skull; or rather, of two paintings in one of the collections at Bologna, the same that contains the Ecce Homo of Correggio; but I have forgotten the name of the gallery, nor is it important. The custode himself, though familiarity might have blunted his feelings, shrunk from it in disgust; for myself, it not only made a deep im. pression on me at the time, but has never recurred to me since with. out causing me to shudder. On one side of a double case is a large miniature in oil, representing a girl: she is in the very zenith of life, and youth, and health, and radiant with all the rich glow of southern beauty. She died, it appears, shortly after sitting for this portrait. Now for the reverse. The father, with a strange caprice, long after she was conveyed to the family vault, had her disinterred, and employed the same artist to draw her then likeness. The work of putrefaction has begun, the lips are purple, the eyes sunken, the worm is at its revels; and yet, horrible to say, there is sufficient similitude between the two faces to establish their identity. O poor mortality! must Caroline soon come to this? Yes, her hour was nigh!

She had an extraordinary talent for music; and composed, the evening before she died, an air that expressed, better than words could do, the peculiar state of her mind, her regret at being about to quit, so young, this beautiful world, which she had almost worshipped.

* In the cabinet of M. Schamps, at Ghent.

It was an apotheosis of nature! a farewell to the universe! It is probable that, feeling her end approach, she had gone down into the breakfast-room early in the morning to play this pathetic dirge; for she was found in a large arm-chair, her fingers extended, as though in the act of touching the piano. Those who discovered her thus, supposed she slept; for the pleasure of the music, and the thoughts that had inspired the air, yet lingered on her countenance, and lit it up with a faint smile. Half hoping, yet fearing to awaken her, they might, with Lear, have applied a mirror to her mouth to see whether her breath would dim its lustre. No! that slumber was her last; her spirit had fled to Him who gave it.

In losing her sister, Julia had lost all the objects of life. Το whom could she now communicate her most secret thoughts; make them intelligible even without words, comprehended by a glance? The books they used to read together, she could not open them without finding some passage one had marked to show the other. The instrument, she could not bear its tones; the duets they had played, the airs they had sung, all the inanimate things in the room, the vacant chair, the unfinished embroidery, her own sketch still lingering in the glass, where it was Caroline's habit to put whatever last had pleased her, so as to have it constantly before her eyes, recalled to her remorseless memory the recollection of her irreparable loss.

Even the face of nature seemed changed: those views on which she had gazed with rapture had lost all their charm. The little garden which Caroline had laid out; the flowers she had planted, and watered; the whispering among the leaves, the ripple of the waves on the sea-shore, the song of the birds, were all associated with her, and did but nourish her grief, and make her solitude more lonely.

Oh! let one who would seek to extinguish unavailing recollections fly from the scenes of former happiness! Two months elapsed, and the general and his surviving daughter had changed their abode for a villa at Tor. Time, that hea's all but compunctious visitings of conscience, had begun to pour its opiate on the soul of Julia. Sighs and tears are the safety-valves of nature; they are the balm of the wounded spirit, like the tenderness of a mother, or the sympathy of an affectionate friend. Her health, too, had begun to improve, and all the worst of her symptoms to disappear, when there arrived at Torbay one of those missionaries, those disciples of the new Whit. field, who, under the mask of adherence to the rights of the esta blished church, preach the desolating doctrines of election and grace-doctrines that overthrew the intellect, and poisoned the life, of one of the most amiable, beneficent, and virtuous of mankind, the infatuated Cowper. This missionary was a man of fifty, with a face in whose hard and strongly marked features were visible the traces of early passions, the violence of which might have driven him into the commission of any crime,-passions that had been smothered, not extinguished, by the cold and calculating dictates of worldly prudence. The inward consciousness of his own sinful nature made him conceive that all the imaginations of the heart are evil, that all hearts are full of concupiscence and the long catalogue of offences which the Apostle enumerates. Continual mortification and penance, and the exercise of prayer, had made him mistake habit

for faith, and belief for conviction; I will acquit him of the hypocrisy of the Pharisee. He was no Turtuffe, such as Molière has drawn, for his zeal and fanaticism were alike indisputable: a zeal for adding to his little flock; and a fanaticism that, leading him step by step to construe to the strict letter, and torture to his own interpretation, the parable of the potter's vessel, and a few texts that had a general application in early days of Christianity, made him implicitly believe that, with the partiality of a father for one child over another, the God by whom he was called to the ministry to preach, had pre-ordained and selected himself, and a chosen few, to complete the number of the elect, whilst all the rest of mankind were irrevocably and irremediably removed out of the pale of salvation.

Such is the human mind, that by intense application and abstraction, by continually brooding on one subject, it can place blind credence in any doctrine, however absurd.

It was not long before, with a spirit of proselytism, he found out Julia.

It is said that the heart is never more disposed for a new attachment than at the moment when the object on which it doted is gone for ever, and that the grave is not one of the affections; Lady Jane Grey is a satire on the sex-a libel on woman. This desolating sentiment is only entertained by those who have never felt the sacred power of love, who have mistaken passion for affection, the joys of the senses for the mystical union of souls. But when all earthly things fail to supply the void in hearts that have once beat with love or affection, they look for consolation in the thoughts of heaven; they seek for things above the earth rather than of it. Never was there a being in an apter state to imbibe the poison which the tempter was bent on instilling than the devoted Julia.

As soon as he became a guest of the house, one selfish feeling swallowed up the rest; religious enthusiasm took possession of her; distracting doubts destroyed the serenity of her soul. At their first conferences, he expressed himself shocked at her utter ignorance of all the tenets of the true faith-at the heathen course of her life; told her she was a stray lamb gone out of the way, that her malady was a just infliction of Providence for sins of omission or commission, that she should consider it as a salutary ordeal through which she should gain the road to salvation. In order to fit her for another world, he enjoined her to wean her affections from all that this contained, to seclude herself from all intercourse with her fellows, and renounce the society of her friends. The love of nature he considered idolatry; her elegant pursuits frivolous, and unworthy a candidate for heaven; he said that by prayer and prostration she should struggle to receive grace divine, and to obtain the conviction that her calling and election were sure.

Such were the doctrines that served to embitter and disturb the remaining hours of this victim of bigotry.

"La mort," says a French writer, "rencontre un puissant auxiliaire dans le moral, quand il se trouve gravement attiré." Thus her disease now made a rapid progress; the worm that preyed on her vitals daily made greater inroads on her constitution, and it was clear that a few weeks would lay her by the side of her sister.

She had till now, in the presence of her father, assumed a cheerfulness, even if she felt it not, and greeted him with a smile of returning happiness; and, however painful the effort it cost, had attended to the affairs of his household. But a change came over her spirit.

During the last visit I paid her, she looked more like the Magdalen of Guido than the Madonna of Raphael. Her eyes were red with weeping; over the natural paleness of her cheek was spread a flush, less of bodily disease than the fever of her mind. She appeared lost in a self-abstraction that eclipsed all external objects, and discovered no light within; such as the fanatic in the exaltation of his fervor finds, to coinpensate for the lost brightness of the world.

For some days before her death, she abode in perfect darkness, and would not even see her father; she refused all sorts of sustenance, or to take her accustomed medicine; and with feeble voice, that inanition rendered more like a murmur or a sound, was heard at intervals muttering accents of despair.

This could not last long. She was found with her hands clasped in the attitude of supplication, in which she died. Her head was bent back on the pillow, and her eyes were raised to heaven.

As these sisters were united in their lives, so far were they in the manner of their death that no one received their last sigh.

These details have little that is dramatic in them, they are scenes that have nothing to recommend them but their fidelity; yet they are not without a moral lesson. I have lately made a pilgrimage to the graves of the Two Sisters, and have thought that they should not perish without some humble record to save their memories from oblivion. I remembered the words of a great poet, and said with a sigh, when two such spirits pass away,

"The world seems sensible of a change:

They leave behind a cold tranquillity,

Death and the grave, that are not as they were!"