Page:Sarah Sheppard - L. E. L.pdf/91



" is a work which displays in its varied beauties great power. There is no character possessing a strong individual interest; nor is the tale itself a highly-wrought fiction. The chief merit consists in the beautiful detached passages, remarkable for their philosophical truth, poetical imagery, and sparkling wit, in the graphic sketches of English society, and in some admirable portraits of a few literary characters. The tale itself is fraught with an important moral lesson. Emily Arundel, the child of prosperity and luxury, goes into society with imagination, and feelings equally susceptible. An attachment springs up in her heart which is not returned by its object. Yielding to her morbid fancy, life thenceforth seems to her to have no future, and she retires into a convent. There she meets with a young Spanish girl, whose whole life has been one of actual exertion and self-sacrifice,—of heroic daring and womanly fortitude and endurance for others, under circumstances alike trying to the courage and feelings. She is now awaiting in the convent the arrival of her father, a Spanish noble, and of her English lover. It was with a bitter feeling that Emily found, in her new friend, her unconscious rival. "Vain regrets ended in a feeling that could live only in the heart of a woman, young, affectionate and unworldly; Lorraine then loved the young Spaniard, and I thought Emily may love her too. A patriot might take his best lesson of disinterestedness from feminine affection." The character and conversation of Beatrice wrought most beneficially on Emily, and led her to see her