misery, bore dreadful witness to the bitter reality of misfortune. The tenderness with which Camilla appears to regard the whole human race, is a delightfully feminine trait. This softness of character preserves her from that misanthropy, to which its sterner features and her habits and circumstances might have inclined her. Her melancholy is not of a gloomy cast; it is gentle and loving; -like all other ideas which pass through her mind, it has imbibed the sweetness that distinguishes her every sentiment. She resembles one of those delicious spirits amongst whom I was wont to revel; for in my boyhood I lived not in the society of my compeers no; but amidst the creations of my own fancy. So essentially were these embodied to my mind, that they became dear and interesting as human friends, and with less variable attachment, for they were always true. Beautiful beings - glorious conceptions - whose glory seemed tarnished by the language in which I sought to realize them, were the objects of my affections and my thoughts. But even to these there was the pain of farewell. They disappeared sometimes to find successors. I remember travelling, for the first time, to a distant place, and coming suddenly upon a scene that recalled to me one of my earliest heroines, on every feature of whose mind I had dwelt with the delighted lingering of a lover. I felt as one who remembers some dear friend from whom an untimely death has separated him, and on whose memory he loved to linger with a sweet sad melancholy. Camilla exercises a spell over my imagination by resembling those intellectual phantoms that have at all times why should I conceal it? hovered about my heart. If my ac - quaintance with her should terminate tomorrow, it is at least something to have known her. Their remoteness from the emporium of fashion, may be some apology for the gothic custom of Mr. Aubertin's family, who dine precisely at four.- By this means, I was able to propose a walk to Camilla on as fine and calm an evening as ever blest this English atmosphere. "I am obliged to call on an old friend this evening," she said; — “if you will be my escorte, I shall be happy to be accompanied by you. I make no apology for leading you to a humble abode. I think too well of you to suppose, that you will find yourself in any very new or ungenial scene. You will see faith on the point of encountering death."- We made this visit of which she spoke. Oh, Camilla, with what absence of all pretension do you exhibit yourself every passing hour, under a new and more touching aspect!-As the angel of benevolence and religion, she bent over the bed of the dying saint who had numbered fourscore years, ministering hope founded on the eternal promises of God. "She speaks of him, her author, guardian, friend, Approaching death seems to give a sacred impressiveness to the simplest wisdom of the humblest man who is about to penetrate the viewless regions of the grave. There was more than serenitythere was the very "rapture of repose," in the eye of that dying elder, who lay before us in "the hope full of immortality." There was a holy and a calm happiness perceptible in every look and word, that seemed incapable of being disturbed by the awful summons-"This night shall thy soul be required of thee." When we quitted him, we walked on long in silence. Feelings corresponding with such scenes are never voluble. The sun was approaching the close of his daily reign. My heart was penetrated with holy and profound emotions, and what I had seen had entered into the very depths of my soul. Camilla leaned upon my arm, and by tacit consent we stood to admire the beautiful world around us. Above us, there was a soft grey sky, gradually blending with the palest rosecolour as it stretched to the horizon. Slanting upwards were the fertile hills of Devon, cultivated and divided by quickset hedges to the very summits, and presenting an astonishing effect from the variety of deep crimson lights and brown shades, giving back in the former the rays of the sun with additional brightness, as a superior genius returns to us any thing communicated to it, with a splendour and embellishment, of which we did not believe the original idea susceptible. The northern base gradually sloped to a clear dark blue river, in which were reflected the beautiful and irregular groups of white houses and well-planned |