Chapter IX: Part II (5)

We are in the high way, it is plain, to a duel. Tasso insists upon an appeal to the sword. The secretary of state contents himself with objecting the privilege or sanctity of the place, they being within the precincts of the royal residence. At the height of this debate, Alphonso enters. Here, again, the minister has a most palpable advantage over the poet. He insists upon the one point of view in which he has the clear right, and will not diverge from it; Tasso has challenged him, has done his utmost to provoke a duel within the walls of the palace; and is, therefore, amenable to the law. The Duke can do no other than decide against the poet, whom he dismisses to his apartment with the injunction that he is there to consider himself, for the present, a prisoner.

In the three subsequent acts, there is still less of action; and we may as well relate at once what there remains of plot to be told, and then proceed with our extracts. Through the mediation of the princess and her friend, this quarrel is in part adjusted, and Tasso is released from imprisonment. But his spirit is wounded, and he determines to quit the court of Ferrara. He obtains permission to travel to Rome. At this juncture he meets with the princess. His impression has been that she also is alienated from him; her conversation removes and quite reverses this impression; in a moment of ungovernable tenderness he is about to embrace her; she repulses him and retires. The duke, who makes his appearance just at this moment, and who has been a witness to the conclusion of this interview, orders Tasso into confinement, expressing at the same time his conviction that the poet has lost his senses. He is given into the charge of Antonio, and thus ends the drama.

Glancing back over the three last acts, whose action we have summed up so briefly, we might select many beautiful passages for translation; we content ourselves with the following.

The princess and Leonora Sanvitale are conversing. There has been question of the departure of Tasso.

"_Princess._--Each day was _then_ itself a little life;
No care was clamorous, and the future slept.
Me and my happy bark the flowing stream,
Without an oar, drew with light ripple down.
Now--in the turmoil of the present hour,
The future wakes, and fills the startled ear
With whisper'd terrors.

"_Leonora._ But the future brings
New joys, new friendships.

"_Princess._ Let me keep the old.
Change may amuse, it scarce can profit us.
I never thrust, with youthful eagerness,
A curious hand into the shaken urn
Of life's great lottery, with hope to find
Some object for a restless, untried heart.
I honour'd him, and therefore have I loved;
It was necessity to love the man
With whom my being grew into a life
Such as I had not known, or dream'd before.
At first, I laid injunctions on myself
To keep aloof; I yielded, yielded still,
Still nearer drew--enticed how pleasantly
To be how hardly punish'd!

"_Leonora._ If a friend
Fail with her weak consolatory speech,
Let the still powers of this beautiful world,
With silent healing, renovate thy spirit.

"_Princess._--The world _is_ beautiful! In its wide circuit,
How much of good is stirring here and there!
Alas! that it should ever seem removed
Just one step off! Throughout the whole of life
Step after step, it leads our sick desire
E'en to the grave. So rarely do men find
What yet seem'd destined them--so rarely hold
What once the hand had fortunately clasp'd;
What has been giv'n us, rends itself away,
And what we clutch'd, we let it loose again;
There is a happiness--we know it not,
We know it--and we know not how to prize."

Tasso says, when he thought himself happy in the love of Leonora d'Este--

"I have often dream'd of this great happiness--
'Tis here!--and oh, how far beyond the dream!
A blind man, let him reason upon light,
And on the charm of colour, how he will,
If once the new-born day reveal itself,
It is a new-born sense."

And again on this same felicity,

"Not on the wide sands of the rushing ocean,
'Tis in the quiet shell, shut up, conceal'd,
We find the pearl."

It is in another strain that the poet speaks when Leonora Sanvitale attempts to persuade him that Antonio entertains in reality no hostility towards him. In what follows, we see the anger and hatred of a meditative man. It is a hatred which supports and exhausts itself in reasoning; which we might predict would never go forth into any act of enmity. It is a mere sentiment, or rather the mere conception of a sentiment. For the poet rather thinks of hatred than positively hates.

"And if I err, I err resolvedly.
I think of him as of my bitter foe;
To think him less than this would now distract,
Discomfort me. It were a sort of folly
To be with all men reasonable; 'twere
The abandonment of all distinctive _self_.
Are all mankind to us so reasonable?
No, no! Man in his narrow being needs
Both feelings, love, and hate. Needs he not night
As well as day? and sleep as well as waking?
No! I will hold this man for evermore
As precious object of my deepest hate,
And nothing shall disturb the joy I have
In thinking of him daily worse and worse."

_Act. 4, Scene 2._

We conclude with a passage in which Tasso speaks of the irresistible passion he feels for his own art. He has sought permission of the Duke to retire to Rome, on the plea that he will there, by the assistance of learned men, better complete his great work, which he regards as still imperfect. Alphonso grants his request, but advises him rather to suspend his labour for the present, and partake, for a season, of the distractions of the world. He would be wise, he tells him, to seek the restoration of his health.

"_Tasso._--It should seem so; yet have I health enow
If only I can labour, and this labour
Again bestows the only health I know.
It is not well with me, as thou hast seen,
In this luxuriant peace. In rest I find
Rest least of all. I was not framed,
My spirit was not destined to be borne
On the soft element of flowing days,
And so in Time's great ocean lose itself
Uncheck'd, unbroken.

"_Alphonso._--All feelings, and all impulses, my Tasso,
Drive thee for ever back into thyself.
There lies about us many an abyss
Which Fate has dug; the deepest yet of all
Is here, in our own heart, and very strong
Is the temptation to plunge headlong in.
I pray thee snatch thyself away in time.
Divorce thee, for a season, from thyself.
The man will gain whate'er the poet lose.

"_Tasso._--One impulse all in vein I should resist,
Which day and night within my bosom stirs.
Life is not life if I must cease to think,
Or, thinking, cease to poetize.
Forbid the silk-worm any more to spin,
Because its own life lies upon the thread.
Still it uncoils the precious golden web,
And ceases not till, dying, it has closed
Its own tomb o'er it. May the good God grant
We, one day, share the fate of that same worm!--
That we, too, in some valley bright with heaven,
Surprised with sudden joy, may spread our wing.

* * * * *

I feel--I feel it well--this highest art
Which should have fed the mind, which to the strong
Adds strength and ever new vitality,--
It is destroying me, it hunts me forth,
Where'er I rove, an exile amongst men."

_Act V. Scene 2._

DAVID THE "TELYNWR;"[20] OR, THE DAUGHTER'S TRIAL.

A TALE OF WALES.

BY JOSEPH DOWNES.

The inhabitants of the white mountain village of K----, in Cardiganshire, were all retired to rest, it being ten o'clock. No--a single light twinkled from under eaves of thick and mossy thatch, in one cottage apart, and neater than the rest, that skirted the steep _street_, (as the salmon fishers, its chief inhabitants, were pleased to call it,) being, indeed, the rock, thinly covered with the soil, and fringed with long grass, but rudely smoothed, where very rugged, by art, for the transit of a _gamboo_ (cart with small wheels of entire wood) or sledge. The moonlight slept in unbroken lustre on the houses of one story, or without any but what the roof slope formed, and several appearances marked it as a fisher village. A black, oval, pitched basket, as it appeared, hung against the wall of several of the cottages, being the _coracle_, or boat for one person, much used on the larger Welsh rivers, very primitive in form and construction, being precisely described by Caesar in his account of the ancient Britons. Dried salmon and other fish also adorned others, pleasingly hinting of the general honesty and mutual confidence of the humble natives, poor as they were, for strangers were never thought of; the road, such as it was, merely mounting up to "the hill" (the lofty desert of sheepwalk) on one hand, and descending steeply to the river Tivy on the other. A deadened thunder, rising from some fall and brawling shallow "rapid" of the river, was the only sound, except the hooting of an owl from some old ivied building, a ruin apparently, visible on the olive-hued precipice behind. The russet mass of mountain, bulging, as it were, over the little range of cots, gave an air of security to their picturesque white beauty; while silver clouds curled and rolled in masses, grandly veiling their higher peaks, and sometimes canopied the roofs, many reddened with wall-flower; the walls also exhibiting streaks of green, where rains had drenched the vegetating thatch and washed down its tint of yellow green. Aged trees, green even to the trunks, luxuriant ivy enveloping them as well as the branches, stretched their huge arms down the declivity leading to the Tivy, the flashing of whose waters, through its rich fringe of underwood, caught the eye of any one standing on the ridge above. A solitary figure, tall and muffled, did stand with his back in contact with one of these oaks, so as to be hardly distinguishable from the trunk.

A poet might imagine, looking at a Welsh village by moonlight, thus embosomed in pastoral mountains, canopied with those silver mists whose very motion was peace, and lulled by those soft solemn sounds, more peace-breathing than even silence, that _there_, at least, care never came; there peace, "if to be found in the world," would be surely found; and soon that one light moving--that prettier painted door stealthily opening--would prove that peace confined to the elements only. "Here I am!" would be groaned to his mind's ear by the ubiquitous, foul fiend, Care; for thence emerged a female form--_simplex munditiis_--the exact description of it as to attire--rather tall than otherwise, but its chief characteristic, a drooping kind of bowed gait, in affecting unison with a melancholy settled over the pale features, so strongly as to be visible even by the moon at a very short distance. Brushing away a tear from each eye, as she held to her breast a little packet of some kind, as soon as she found (as she imagined) the coast clear, she proceeded, after fastening her door, toward one of the bowered footpaths leading to the river. The concealed man looked after her, prepared to follow, when some belated salmon fisher, his dark coracle, strapped to his back, nodding over his head, appeared. This lurking personage was nicknamed "Lewis the Spy" by the country people. He was the agent, newly appointed, to inspect the condition of a once fine but most neglected estate, which had recently come into possession of a "Nabob," as they called him--a gentleman who had left Wales a boy, and was now on his voyage home to take possession of a dilapidated mansion called Talylynn. Lewis, his forerunner and plenipotentiary, was the dread and hate of the alarmed tenants. He had already ejected from his stewardship a good but rather indolent old man, John Bevan, who had grown old in the service of the former "squire;" and besides kept watch over the doings on the farms in an occult and treacherous manner, prowling round their "folds" by dusk, and often listening to conversations by concealing himself. Such was the man who now accosted the humble fisherman. Reverentially, as if to the terrible landlord himself, the peasant bared his head to his sullen representative.

"Who is that young woman?" he enquired, sternly, though well knowing who she was.

"Dim Saesneg," answered the man, bowing.

"None of your Dim Saesneg to me, fellow," rejoined Lewis, sternly. "Did not I hear you swearing in good English at a _Saesyn_ (Englishman or Saxon) yesterday?"

The Welshman begged pardon in good Saxon, and answered at last--

"Why, then, if it please your honour, her name be Winifred--her other name be Bevan--_Miss_ Bevan, the school--her father be Mister Bevan of Llaneol, steward that was to our old squire of the great house, 'the Hall'--Talylynn Hall--where there's a fine lake. I warrant your honour has fished there. You Saesonig gentlemen do mostly do nothing but fish and shoot in our poor country; I beg pardon, but you look _Saesoniadd_, (Saxonlike,) I was thinking--fine lake, but the trout be not to compare"----

"Well," interrupted the other laughing, "your English tongue can wag as glib as your outlandish one. A sweetheart in the case there, isn't there? What the devil's she going down to the river for at this time of night, else?"

"Why, to be sure there be!" the man answered. "_We_ all know that; poor thing, she had need find some comforter in all her troubles--her father so poor, and in debt to this strange foreigner, who's on the water coming home now, and has made proposals for her in marriage, so they do _say_; but it's like your honour knows more of that than I do--for be not you Mr Lewis, I beg pardon, Lewis Lewis, esquire?"

"And what do you know of this sweetheart of hers? Is he her _first_, think ye? _I_ doubt that," rejoined Lewis, not noticing his enquiry----

"_You_ may doubt what your honour pleases, but _we_ don't--no; never man touched her _hand_ hardly, never one her lips, before--I did have it from her mother; but as for this one she's found at last, we wish she'd a better"----

"What's the matter with him, then?"

"Oh, nothing more than that he's poor, sir--poor; and that _we_ don't know much about the stranger"----

"What '_we_' do you mean, while you talk of 'we'?"

"Lord bless ye, sir, why us all of this bankside, and this side Tivy, the great family of us, she's just like _our_ little girl to us all; for don't she have all our young ones to give 'em learning, whether the Cardigan ladies pay for 'em or don't? And wasn't poor dear old John Bevan the man who would lend every farmer in the parish a help in money or any way, only for asking? So it is, you see, she has grown up among us. This young man, though he may be old for what I know, never seeing him in my life--you see, sir, we on this side of Tivy are like strangers to the Cardy men, t'other side--_they_ are _Cardie's_, sure enow, _true_ ones, as the Saxon foreign folk do call us _all_ of this shire. I wouldn't trust one of 'em t'other side, no further than I could throw him. I'll tell ye a story"----

"Never mind. What about David?"

"Oh, ho! You know his name, then? Well, and that's all _I_ do--pretty nigh. He lives with a woman who fostered him after his own mother died in travail with him, they do say, who has a little house, beyond that lump of a mountain, above all the others, we see by daylight; he has been in England, and is a strange one for music. He owes (owns, possesses,) a beautiful harp--_beautiful_! The Lord knows, some do say, that's all he owes in the world, so (except) his coracle and the salmon he takes, and what young people do give him at weddings and biddings, where he goes to play: and what's that to keep a wife? Poor Davy _Telynwr_! Yet, by my soul, we all say we'd rather see her his than this foreigner gentleman's, who has almost broke her heart, they say, by coming between her and her own dear one."

"He's _not_ come yet," muttered the other, sullenly; adding, sharply and bitterly, "Mighty good friends you all are, to wish her married to a beggar, a vagabond harper, rather than to a gentleman."

"Why--to be sure, sir--but vows be vows--love's love--and to tell truth, sir," (the Welsh blood of the Cardy peasant was now up,) "if any foreign, half Welsh, half wild Indian, sort of gentleman had sent his fine letters, asking my sweetheart's friends to turn _me_ off, in my courting days, and prepare my wench to be his lady, instead of my wife--I'd have--I'd have"--

"_What_ would you have done?" asked the other, laughing heartily.

"Cursed him to St Elian!" roared the other; then, dropping his voice into a solemn tone, "put him into his well.[21] _I'd_ have plagued him, I warrant. But for _my_ part," added the man archly, "I don't believe there's any _squire_ lover in the case--nor that your honour ever said there is." The agent here vanished, as if in haste, abruptly, down the steep path.

During this conversation, Winifred had reached the river. While she stands expectant, not in happiness, but in tears, it is time to say a few words of the lover so expected.

David, who was lately become known "on t'other side Tivy," by the name of _Nosdethiol Telynwr_, that is, "night-walking harper," was an idle romantic young man, almost grown out of youth, who had long lived away from Wales, where he had neither relative nor friend but one aged woman who had been his first nurse, he having been early left an orphan. Without settled occupation or habits, he was understood almost to depend for bread on the salmon he caught, and trifling presents received. A small portable harp, of elegant workmanship, (adorned with "_real_ silver," so _ran the tale_,) was the companion of his moonlight wanderings. He had a whim of serenading those who had never heard of a "serenade," but were not the less sensible of a placid pleasure at being awakened by soft music in some summer sight. The simple mountain cottagers, whose slumbers he thus broke or soothed, often attributed the sweet sounds to the kindness of some wandering member of the "Fair Family," or _Tylwyth Têg_, the fairies. Nor did his figure, if discovered vanishing between the trees, if some one ventured to peep out, in a light night, dispel the illusion; for it appears, that the fairy of old Welsh superstition was not of diminutive stature."[22] That he was "very learned," had somewhere acquired much knowledge of books, however little of men, was reported on both sides of the river; and these few particulars were almost all that was known even to Winifred, who had so rashly given all her thoughts, all her hopes, all her heart almost, (reserving only one sacred corner for her beloved parents,) to this dangerous stranger--for stranger he was still to her in almost all outer circumstances of life. This was partly owing to the interposition of that narrow river, however trivial a line of demarcation that must appear to English people, accustomed to cross even great rivers of commerce, like the Thames, as they would step over a brook or ditch, by the frequent aid of bridges and boats. In Wales, bridges are too costly to be common. When reared, some unlucky high flood often sweeps them away. Intercourse by ferryboats and fords is liable to long interruptions. The dwellers of opposite sides frequent different markets, and belong frequently to different counties. The nature of the soil also often differs wholly. Hence it happens, that sometimes a farmer, whose eye rests continually on the little farm and fields of another, on the opposite "bank," rising from the river running at the base of his own confronting hill-side, lives on, ignorant almost of the name, quite of the character, of their tenant, to whom he could almost make himself heard by a shout--if it happens that neither ford, ferry, nor bridge, is within short distance.

"The people of t'other side," is an expression implying nearly as much strangeness, and contented ignorance of these neighbours, and no neighbours, as the same spoken by the people of Dover or Calais, of those t'other side the Channel. It was not, therefore, surprising that poor Winifred (albeit not imprudent, save in this new-sprung passion,) might have said with the poet, too truly,

"I know not, I ask not, what guilt's in that heart;
I but know that I love thee, whatever thou art."

This wild reckless sentiment (though scarcely true to love's nature, which is above all things curious about all belonging to its object) did in her case illustrate her feelings. Winifred had lately disclosed to her dear "unknown" the ruin impending over her father, the result of his mingled good-nature and indolence, he having permitted the tenants to run in arrears, and suffer dilapidations, as already said;--the long neglect, however, of the East Indian landlord being at the root of the evil, who had been as remiss in his dealings with the steward as the steward with the tenants. The first appearance of this newly appointed agent, who announced the early return of his employer to take possession of the decayed manor-house, was as sudden as ominous of the ruin of old John Bevan. The hope he held out of the "Nabob" espousing his long-remembered child, Winifred, and the consequent salvation of her father, seemed too romantic to be believed. Yet this man proved himself duly accredited by his principal, and exercised his power already with severity. The fine old house of Talylynn, a mansion rising close to a small beautiful lake skirted by an antique park with many deer, was already almost prepared for the reception of the "squire from abroad." Meanwhile--what most excited the ill-will of the tenantry--this odious persecutor of the all-beloved John Bevan had also furbished up a neat old house adjoining the park gate, as a residence for himself; while poor Bevan's farm-house of Llaneol was suffered to fall into ruinous decay--the new steward even neglecting to keep it weather-tight.

Thus decayed, and almost ruinous, it seemed more in harmony with the fortunes of the ever resigned and patient man. But his less placid dame, after losing the services of Winifred, had fallen into a peevish sort of despondency, as the father, missing her society, and its finer species of consolation, had sunk into a more placid apathy.

David had received the hint of her possible self-devotion to the coming "squire" with very little philosophy, little temper, and no allowance for the feelings of an only daughter expecting to see a white-headed, fond father, dragged from his home to a jail. He had been incensed; he had wronged her by imputations of sordid motives--of pride, of contempt for _himself_ as a beggar; and at last broke from her in sullen resentment, after requiring her to bring all his letters, at their next interview, which was to be a farewell one. And now she was bringing every thing she had received from him, in sad obedience to this angry demand. Nor was all his wrath, his injustice, and his despair, really unacceptable to her secret heart. She would not have had him patient under even the prospective possibility of her marrying another.

But his manner at this meeting announced a change in his whole sentiments.

His very first words, (cold, yet kind, but how altered in tone!) with his constrained deportment, expressed his acquiescence in her purpose, whether pride, jealousy, or a juster estimate of her filial virtue, had induced the stern resolve.

Winifred had never known the full strength of her own passion till now! The idea of an early eternal end to their ungratified loves, which had for some time become familiar to her own secret mind, assumed a new and strange terror for her imagination the moment it ceased to be hers _alone_. The shock was novel and overpowering, when the separation seemed acquiesced in by him, thus putting it out of her own power to hesitate further between devotion to the lover or to the parent. His reconciled manner, his calm taking her by the hand, even the kiss which she could not resist, were more painful than his utmost resentment would have been. Yet there was a sad severity in his look, as his fine countenance of deep melancholy turned to the bright moon, which a little comforted her, and indicated that it was pride rather than patience which led to his affected contentment. _He_ had not a parent to nerve _his_ heart to the sacrifice.

"I passed _your_ home yesterday," he began sarcastically: "it is a fine place again, already, that hall of Talylynn, and wants only as fine a mistress."

"You wrong me, David _bach_! on my life and soul you do, _dear_ David!" she replied sobbing. "'Tis a hateful hall--a horrid hall! If it were only I, your poor lost Winifred, that was to suffer, oh! how much sooner would I be carried dead into a vault, than alive, and dressed in all the finest silks of India, into that dreadful house you twit me with!--unkind, unkind!" And almost fainting, her head sunk upon his shoulder, and his arm was required to support her.

Instantly she recovered, and stood erect. "But oh, David, there is another dreadful place, and another dear being besides you, dearest, that I think of night and day! The horrid castle jail--my dear, dear father! Oh, if this Lewis speaks truth, and if that strange boy--I only knew him as a boy, you know--who has power to ruin him, (_will_ surely ruin him!) will _indeed_ forgive him all he owes; will really become his son--his son-in-law, instead of his merciless creditor; oh! could I refuse _my_ part, shocking part though it be? I should not suffer long, David--I feel I should not."

"And pray, what _kind_ of youth--_boy_ as you are pleased to call him--was this nabob then?" enquired her lover, apparently startled at learning the fact of her having had some previous knowledge of his powerful rival.

"A youth! a mere child, when I last saw him," she answered. "I thought you had known all about him."

"Nothing more than his name; how came you in his company?"

"His father, living in India, was half-brother to our old squire, Fitzarthur of Talylynn. His mother dying, his widower father, whose health was broken up before, came over here, this being his native country, in hope of recovering it; but died at Talylynn, leaving one child, that little orphan boy, heir, after his half-uncle's death, to all this property. You have often heard me tell how like two brothers my dear father and _our_ old squire were always--though father was only a steward--how he used to have me at the great house, for a month at a time, where he had me taught by a lady who lived with him, before I went to school; and so I used often to see that little boy in black--very queer and sullen he was thought; but he had no playfellow, except an owl that he kept tame, I remember, and cried when he buried him in the garden,--the only time he was ever known to cry, he was so still and stern. It was _I_ caught him, then acting the sexton by himself, close by the high box hedge, under a great tree. I remember the spot now, and remember how angry I made him by laughing."

"And you did wrong to laugh, if it was so serious to him."

"Oh! but I did not know he was crying when I laughed, and _was_ sorry when I detected it. One thing was, the old gentleman was so jovial, and loved a good laugher, and was rather too fond of wine, and mostly out hunting, so that the poor boy had to find his own amusement. He seemed fond of me, but hated, he said, his uncle, and his hounds, and his ways, and every thing there but his own owl; so that nobody was sorry when he was fetched back to India, to be put in the where he was to make the fortune he has now made, I suppose."

"And your little heart did throb a little, and sink for a day, when this playfellow was shipped off for life, as you thought, and you _did_ remember his funeral tears over his owl, and"--a quaver of voice and betrayed earnestness revealed the jealous pang shooting across the heart of the speaker; but her own was too heavy and deeply anxious to prolong this desultory talk.

She only added--"Heaven knows how little I thought that poor stranger boy would ever grow to be what he is to me now."

"_What he is to you?_ Why, what then is he, Winifred?"

"The horror of my thoughts, my dreams, my"----she answered sobbing. "But why should I say so? Wicked I am to feel him so, if he is _indeed_ to be the saviour of my dear, dear father!" And she turned away to shed relieving tears.

"And this little packet contains my letters--_all_, does it?" he asked, touching the small parcel she had deposited within a cleft of the hollow river-side tree, by which they stood, the post-office of their happier days, where, concealed by thick moss gathered from the bole, those letters had every one been searched for and found--with what a leap of heart, first felt! how fondly thrust into her bosom, for the leisure delight of opening at home--and all in vain!

"All but one," she answered tremulously; "I brought then because you bade me--but you were so angry _then_--let me take them back?" and she clutched them eagerly. "At least we may wait, David--we don't know yet; I do suspect that Lewis Lewis--he shuns me as if he was conscious of some wickedness; he's as horrid to me as his master--the thought of his master--I do forbode something awful from that man! It was but just before I heard you brushing among those great low branches, in your coracle, that I fancied I saw him stealing, as if to watch, or perhaps waylay you; but I am full of dismal thoughts."

He had not the heart to force his letters, so reluctantly resigned, from her chilly hand. But he held in his what was calculated to inspire pain quite as poignant. In the fond admiration of her fancy's first object, she had vehemently longed for a portrait of that rather singular face--a long oval, with lofty forehead, already somewhat corrugated by habits of deep thought, in his lonely night-loving existence; its mixture of passion, dumb poetry, its constitutional or adventitious profound melancholy, ever present, till his countenance gradually lighted up, after her coming and her animating discourse, like some deep gloomy valley growing light as the sun surmounts a lofty bank, gleaming through its pines. She had forced him to take a piece of money for procuring this so desired keepsake, and every time they met, she had fondly hoped to have the little portrait put into her hand. Now, instead, he presented the unused money--would she retain the image of a sweetheart in the home of her stern and lordly husband? Her heart confessed that she must no longer wish for it--but it sunk within her at the thought, how soon that innocent would be a guilty wish; and when he surprised her with the money so suddenly, she involuntarily shuddered, forebore to close her hand upon it, let it slide from her palm, and murmured only with her innocent plaintiff voice, "I shall never have your picture now--_never_!" And then she dejected her eyes to the little parcel of letters, written, received, kissed, and kept, like something holy, so long in vain; and all the charming hopeful hours in which each was found, when some longer absence had given to each a deeper interest, and higher value--those hours never to return, came shadowing over her mind, memory, and soul, and a lethargy of despairing grief imposed a ghost-like semblance of calm on her whole figure, and her face slowly assumed a deadly paleness, even to the lips, visible even by the moon. David grew alarmed, relapsed into the full fondness of former hours, folded the dumb, drooping, and agonized young woman in his arms, to his bosom! without her betraying consciousness, and yet she was not fainting; she stood upright, and her eyes, though fixed as if glazed, still expressed love in their almost shocking fixedness.

The young man grew terrified. "Look up! speak to me! Winifred, _dear_ Winifred, my _own_ Winifred, in spite of all!" he broke forth. "Smile at me, my dearest, once more, and keep these foolish letters you so value, keep them _all_." And he thrust them into her passive hand.

Aroused by his words and action, poor Winifred, starting with a gasp, wildly kissed the little packet, and thanked him by an embrace more passionate than her prudence or modesty would have permitted, had they been happy.

"And my portrait--my ugliness in paint, and on ivory too, dearest, you shall have yet, as you desire it," he added, forcing pleasantry; "only do not fall into that frightful sort of trance again."

He little knew what deadliness of thoughts, almost of purpose, had produced that long abstracted fit. The most exemplary prudence (the result of a sound mind and heart) had characterised this young woman till now. While yet at home, her bodily activity surprised her parents. Their means having been long but low, they had little help in their dairy and small farming concerns. She often surprised her mother with the sight of the butter already churned, the ewes already milked, or the cheeses pressed, when she arose. She was abroad in the heavy dews of morning, when the sun at midsummer rises in what is properly the night, regarded as the hour of rest--abroad, happy and cheerful, calling the few cows in the misty meadows. Nor did this habit of early rising prevent her indulging at night her _one_ unhappy habit--romance-reading; a pleasure which she enjoyed through the kindness of many ladies of the town of Cardigan, who afterwards established her in her school at K----. They supplied her with these dangerous volumes that exalted passion--love in excess--above all the aims and pursuits of life: represented her who loves most madly as most worthy of sympathy; and even, too often, crowned the heroine with the palm of self-martyrdom--making suicide itself no longer a crime or folly, but almost a virtue, under certain contingencies.

When poverty increased, the activity of her powerful intellect was brought into display, as much as her personal activity had been, in devising resources. She had acquired some skill in drawing, through the kindness of the neighbouring gentry, and she improved herself so far as to execute very respectable drawings of the ruins of Kilgerran Castle, on her own river, and other fine scenes of Wales; and these were sold for her (or rather for her parents) by others, at fairs and wakes, where she never appeared herself. When residing at the village, her wheel was heard in the morning before others were stirring, and at late night, after every other one was still. Her little light, gleaming in the lofty village, espied between the hanging trees, was the guiding star of the belated fisher up the narrow goat's-path which led to the village, who could always obtain light for his pipe at "_Miss Bevan's_, the school," when not a casement had exhibited a taper for hours. But the evil of all this wear and tear of mind and body was, that it maintained an unnatural state of excitement in the one, and of weakness (disguised by that fever of imagination) in the other. Sleep, the preserver of health and tranquillity of mind, was exchanged for lonely emotions excited by night reading. She was weeping over the dramatist's fifth act of tragedy, or the romancist's more morbid appeals to the passions, while nature demanded rest. Then an accidental meeting with the young harper--he recovering a book she had dropped into the Tivy out of her hand, from having fallen asleep through exertion, and restoring it with a grace quite romance-hero like--produced a new era, and new excitement--that of the heart. Thenceforth, she became "of imagination all compact," however her strong sense preserved her purity and virtue. But no more dangerous lover could be imagined than such a loose hanger-on, rather than member, of society as David the _Telynwr_--for _his_ nature was _hers_; except, perhaps, in virtuous resolution, he was a female Winifred. Yet he possessed a romantic "leaning, at least, to virtue's side."

This was oddly exemplified now, (to return to their present position;) for as soon as her partial recovery had removed his alarm, he grew cold, and almost severe in his manner, and broke forth--

"_So_, then, Winifred would willingly pore over the love-letters of a sweetheart while under a husband's roof! She thinks this beauty enough for _him_--she would reserve her thoughts, wishes, every thing else, for his old rival;--every thing but what a ring, and a few words, makes his right by law, the poor husband is to leave to any old sweetheart that may come prowling round his gates! That's gross! Is it _not_, Winifred?"

Alas! the heart-broken young woman had been meditating on far other issue to their brief attachment! On death!--death on her wedding-day, as the only means of preserving at once her father's liberty and her own virtue; for her reading had taught her that marriage, where the mind and heart were so wholly engaged elsewhere, was no better than legalised prostitution. With a look of dark intensity of meaning, Winifred broke her lengthened silence, saying hollowly--

"I was not looking so far forward--I was not looking beyond _that_ day--not to that"----_night_, she would have said, but modesty stopped her speech. "And _you_ can be so calm! so thoughtful! _You_ can be reasoning about my duties during a life! you can be pleading for _my_ future husband! Oh, I wish I were like you! And yet, I bless God, that you are not like _me_! I would not have you feel as I do for the world! No, not even know what I am feeling, thinking, dearest, at this moment."

"No!" David again muttered, more and more severely, "I cannot submit to have my letters and trifling keepsakes to be tossed about by _him_! It is weakness to wish it, Winifred Bevan; and worse for me to grant it."

"You shall have them all--all--all!" she exclaimed in passionate agony composed of tenderness, anguish, anger, recklessness, with a bitterness of irony keener to her own heart, than to him who roused that terrible reaction of her nature. "I'll run and fetch them all this very night! Oh, they'll serve for _your_ new love. You may copy your letters. I'm sure, if she have a human heart, they'll move it--they'll win it! Strike my name out, and you may send the very letters. She will not know that another heart was broken by giving them up! She will not know the stains are tears of pleasure dropped upon them! And you shall have _that_ too, if you will--if you must!"

"Which? what? dearest creature, but compose yourself--pray do!" he said, again alarmed.

"_That_ you sent with the lock of hair--_this_ hair!" she answered wildly. "But you _will_ leave me the little lock? Oh, there's plenty to cut for _another_ here!" and she laughed hysterically, frightfully, and played with his profusion of raven hair; but it was mournful play. "Leave me--_do_ leave poor Winifred that, David, for the love of God! In mercy, leave it! I will not ask for the picture again--I will not _wish_ it, if _you_ say I must not; but the hair--the poor bit of hair--he! oh, misery! he shall never see it! I myself will never cry over it--never look at it, if you think it wrong--never till I'm dying, David--dying! There will be no harm then, you know, in looking--in a poor dying creature's look, who has done with passions, life, love, every thing. And none--none shall see it but those who lay me out, or they who find my--oh! we none of us know where we may die, or how! It may be alone, dearest--_alone_! Oh, the comfort it will be to have a part of very _you_ to hold--to hold by, like this very hand, in my death-damp one. Let me have it!" she shrilly implored, in delirious energy. "I want it to take with me to my death-bed--to my death-pit--my grave, whatever it may be--to heaven itself--to our place of meeting again, if it were possible! Oh, that it _were_ possible! and that I might bring back to you there the kiss--the long kiss--you shall leave on these wretched lips when we part for ever and for ever here! _Will_ you take it from me, David, my heart, my soul? No, you will not?"

The crisis of love's parting agony was at its height. Half-conscious of her own dangerous prostration of soul and mind under its power, she turned from the dear object, and rested her forehead against the trunk of their old tree of assignation; and a steady, sadder shower of tears, relieving her full heart, followed this storm of various and rapid emotions, sweeping over one weakened mind, like thunderclouds charged with electric fire, borne on a whirlwind over a whole landscape, in a few minutes of mingled gloom and glory. For, in the sublime of passion, whatever be its nature, is there not a terrible joy, a secret glorifying of the earthy nature, which we may compare to such elemental war--now hanging all heaven in mourning, and bringing night on noonday, and presently illuminating that day with a ghastly, momentary light, brilliant even beyond its own?