Page:The Gift, a Christmas and New Year's Present for 1842.djvu/168

158 large luminous eyes of her kindred. Her beauty, nevertheless, was of that nature which leads the heart to wonder not less than to love. The grace of her motion was surely ethereal. Her fantastic step left no impress upon the asphodel—and I could not but dream as I gazed, enrapt, upon her alternate moods of melancholy and of mirth, that two separate souls were enshrined within her. So radical were her changes of countenance, that at one instant I fancied her possessed by some spirit of smiles, at another by some demon of tears.

She was a maiden artless and innocent as the brief life she had led among the flowers. No guile disguised the fervour of love which animated her heart—and she examined with me its inmost recesses, as we walked together in the Valley of the Many-Coloured Grass, and discoursed of the mighty changes which had lately taken place. At length, having spoken, one day, in tears, of the last sad change which must befall humanity, she thenceforward dwelt only upon this one sorrowful theme, interweaving it into all our converse—as in the songs of the Bard of Shiraz the same images are found occurring again and again in every impressive variation of phrase.

She had seen that the finger of death was upon her bosom—that, like the ephemera, she had been made perfect in loveliness only to die; but the terrors of the grave, to her, lay solely in a consideration which she revealed to me, one still evening at twilight, by the banks of the River of Silence. She grieved to think that, having entombed her in the Valley of the Many-Coloured Grass, I would quit for ever its happy recesses, transferring the love which was now so passionately her own to some maiden of the outer and every-day world.

And then and there I threw myself hurriedly at the feet of Eleonora, and offered up a vow to herself and to Heaven