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lowed and romantic character (the Kirtle is still there) not exhibited by other burying-grounds in Scotland. In those retreats, the members of the family of Kirconnel passed the greater part of their time. Helen, though a lover of home, was fond of gratifying a fancy pregnant of beautiful images, and a taste for what is lovely in nature, by sitting by the banks of the Kirtle, and supplying her mind with the pabulum of the old Scottish romances. "Raf Coilyear and his Cross-bow," and "Gilbert with the White Hand," though soon superseded by the continental romances, were then the legitimate fountains of amusement to the fair maids of Scotland; and those who aimed at sublimer flights, might have had recourse to "Fyn Maccowl," or "Gret Gow Macmorne;" but there was in none of the works as yet circulated in Scotland, what might gratify the intense yearnings of the female heart for those poetical images which subsequently sprang up with the more mature growth of chivalry. The loves of warriors are not the loves of everyday life, far less the loves of the inspired poet; and Helen, as she read these old legendary romances, might find in them the amusement that afforded a relaxing alternative to her own poetical communings with the oldest bard of all--Nature; but for the inspiration of love itself she required the talisman--man--in that high aspect she had prefigured of the noblest of God's creatures, to rouse her heart from nature to the lover's dream. As yet the Maid of Kirconnel had not seen any one that realised the idea she had formed, by the banks of the Kirtle, of the individual who could call up in her young bosom those extraordinary emotions which constitute "love's young dream." The secluded mode of life adopted by her parents was unfavourable to a choice of the talismanic objects; and it even appeared to be her father and mother's wish that such choice should be excluded, that her heart might, in the absence of many forms, learn to be pleased with the man whom their love or policy might point out to her adoption. A second cousin of her own, Walter Bell of Blacket House, had a free passport to the hall of Kirconnel, as well as to the bowers that were enshrined in Kirconnel woods. The laird saw in the young man his nearest heir, in the event of his Helen being taken from him by fate; and the lady could detect, as she thought, in Bell's quiet and sombre manner, some assimilation to her own love of retirement and ease, an
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