Page:The New Monthly Magazine - Volume 095.djvu/266

Rh A young lady of noble family is placed by her relatives as a boarder in a convent, where she is to be strictly guarded, and made to go through various penances, until she shall consent to marry the person they have chosen for her husband. One evening, during vespers, a young knight makes his appearance in the chapel, is taken suddenly ill, declares himself dying, and calls for the prior to shrive him before he departs. The prior leaves the high altar, and hastens to the stranger-penitent, who, murmuring in a failing voice that he hears spirits calling him to death and judgment, sinks into the arms of the priest, and whispers a bequest of all that he owns to the convent; praying only that he may be buried there. Meantime, the nuns, novices, and boarders, have all been driven off to their cells by the prioress, who had overheard a faint scream from one of them. It is determined between the prior and prioress that some one shall watch the body during the night, for all honour is to be paid the remains of the stranger, whose last act was to give his worldly goods to the pious establishment. The prioress inflicts this office, by way of a hardship, on Agnetè, the boarder, who was not inclined to matrimony, and bestows a lecture on her for not obeying her family’s wishes by marrying "Ridder Podebusch." The young lady, however, declares that she will never marry any one; that she wishes to become a nun, and that she will give all her maternal inheritance to the convent, if the prioress will only grant her a home and a grave. The prioress communicates this new turn of affairs to the prior; they felicitate themselves on two windfalls in one day, and the prioress, returning to Agnetè, releases her from the threatened penance of watching by the dead body. To her surprise, however, Agnetè entreats to be permitted to perform this melancholy task, and the prioress, who has become very indulgent and obliging all of a sudden, tells her she shall do exactly as she pleases. It ends in the damsel shutting herself up in the cold church at midnight, alone with the dead body. Lights are burning round the coffin, and when certain that no human eye is upon her, Agnetè throws herself upon the corpse in a passion of grief, and pours out her love for him who she thinks is no more. But the young knight is not dead; and when he hears that he had been "her thought and her dream from her childhood," he raises himself up in his coffin, and after having frightened her almost into a fainting fit, assures her that he is living, that he participates in all her feelings, and that it was to aid her to escape that he had played the part of a corpse. None of the inmates of the convent cared to enter the chapel in the dead of night; so the lovers were enabled to make good their retreat, and by dawn of day they were in happy safety with a friend of the adventurous youth. Ingemann wickedly hints, that the younger nuns wished some more dead men would come to carry them all off too.

Ingemann introduces so many dramatis personæ into his novels, that one is rather bewildered by their numbers; but he contrives to make them all efficient, and bearing different characteristics. He is called "the Walter Scott of Denmark." We cannot honestly say that he is quite equal to the Wizard of the North, but he does not fall far short of him. It is certainly a compliment to the real Walter Scott, that the greatest praise which foreign nations can bestow on their best writers of historical romances, is to call them "the Walter Scott" of their country. Ingemann is a poet and dramatist, as well as a writer of romances. "De