ad the fierce anathemas against love,
liberty, and pleasure, poetry, painting, and music, gold, silver, and
precious stones, which the ancient fathers had composed for the benefit
of the submissive congregations of former days; vainly did she imagine,
during those long hours of theological instruction, that her heart's
forbidden longings were banished and destroyed--that her patient and
childlike disposition was bowed in complete subserviency to the most
rigorous of her father's commands. No sooner were her interviews with
Numerian concluded than the promptings of that nature within us, which
artifice may warp but can never destroy, lured her into a forgetfulness
of all that she had heard and a longing for much that was forbidden.
We live, in this existence, but by the companionship of some sympathy,
aspiration, or pursuit, which serves us as our habitual refuge from the
tribulations we inherit from the outer world. The same feeling which
led Antonina in her childhood to beg for a flower-garden, in her
girlhood induced her to gain possession of a lute.

The passion for music which prompted her visit to Vetranio, which alone
saved her affections from pining in the solitude imposed on them, and
which occupied her leisure hours in the manner we have already
described, was an inheritance of her birth.

Her Spanish mother had sung to her, hour after hour, in her cradle, for
the short time during which she was permitted to watch over her child.
The impression thus made on the dawning faculties of the infant,
nothing ever effaced. Though her earliest perception were greeted only
by the sight of her father's misery; though the form which his
despairing penitence soon assumed doomed her to a life of seclusion and
an education of admonition, the passionate attachment to the melody of
sound, inspired by her mother's voice--almost imbibed at her mother's
breast--lived through all neglect, and survived all opposition. It
found its nourishment in childish recollections, in snatches of street
minstrelsy heard through her window, in the passage of the night winds
of winter through the groves on the Pincian Mount, and received its
rapturous gratification in the first audible sounds from the Roman
senator's lute. How her possession of an instrument, and her skill in
playing, were subsequently gained, the reader already knows from
Vetranio's narrative at Ravenna. Could the frivolous senator have
discovered the real intensity of th