ine--sweet gift!--to charm the heart,
Though all its other joys have fled!

Time, that withers all beside,
Harmless past me loves to glide;
Change, that mortals must obey,
Ne'er shall shake my gentle sway;
Still 'tis mine all hearts to move
In eternity of love.

As the last sounds of her voice and her lute died softly away upon the
still night air, an indescribable elevation appeared in the girl's
countenance. She looked up rapturously into the far, star-bright sky;
her lip quivered, her dark eyes filled with tears, and her bosom heaved
with the excess of the emotions that the music and the scene inspired.
Then she gazed slowly around her, dwelling tenderly upon the fragrant
flower-beds that were the work of her own hands, and looking forth with
an expression half reverential, half ecstatic over the long, smooth,
shining plains, and the still, glorious mountains, that had so long
been the inspiration of her most cherished thoughts, and that now
glowed before her eyes, soft and beautiful as her dreams on her virgin
couch. Then, overpowered by the artless thoughts and innocent
recollections which on the magic wings of Nature and Night came wafted
over her mind, she bent down her head upon her lute, pressed her round,
dimpled cheek against its smooth frame, and drawing her fingers
mechanically over its strings, abandoned herself unreservedly to the
reveries of maidenhood and youth.

Such was the being devoted by her father's fatal ambition to a lifelong
banishment from all that is attractive in human art and beautiful in
human intellect! Such was the daughter whose existence was to be one
long acquaintance with mortal woe, one unvaried refusal of mortal
pleasure, whose thoughts were to be only of sermons and fasts, whose
action were to be confined to the binding up of strangers' wounds and
the drying of strangers' tears; whose life, in brief, was doomed to be
the embodiment of her father's austere ideal of the austere virgins of
the ancient Church!

Deprived of her mother, exiled from the companionship of others of her
age, permitted no familiarity with any living being, no sympathies with
any other heart, commanded but never indulged, rebuked but never
applauded, she must have sunk beneath the severities imposed on her by
her father, but for the venial disobedience committed in the pursuit of
the solitary pleasure procured for her by her lute. Vainly, in her
hours of study, did she re