s will look from the mystery of their untracked
and impenetrable home, to mock, as now, with their immutability, the
variations and shadows of mankind!

FROM ERASMUS FALKLAND, ESQ., TO LADY EMILY MANDEVILLE.

At length, then, you are to be mine--you have consented to fly with me.
In three days we shall leave this country, and have no home--no world
but in each other. We will go, my Emily, to those golden lands where
Nature, the only companion we will suffer, woos us, like a mother, to
find our asylum in her breast; where the breezes are languid beneath the
passion of the voluptuous skies; and where the purple light that invests
all things with its glory is only less tender and consecrating than the
spirit which we bring. Is there not, my Emily, in the external nature
which reigns over creation, and that human nature centred in ourselves,
some secret and undefinable intelligence and attraction? Are not the
impressions of the former as spells over the passions of the later? and
in gazing upon the loveliness around us, do we not gather, as it were,
and store within our hearts, an increase of the yearning and desire of
love? What can we demand from earth but its solitudes--what from heaven
but its unpolluted air? All that others would ask from either, we can
find in ourselves. Wealth--honour--happiness--every object of ambition
or desire, exist not for us without the circle of our arms! But the
bower that surrounds us shall not be unworthy of your beauty or our
love. Amidst the myrtle and the vine, and the valleys where the summer
sleeps and "the rivers that murmur the memories and the legends of old
amidst the hills and the glossy glades," and the silver fountains,
still as beautiful as if the Nymph and Spirit yet held and decorated an
earthly home; amidst these we will make the couch of our bridals, and
the moon of Italian skies shall keep watch on our repose.

Emily!--Emily!--how I love to repeat and to linger over that beautiful
name! If to see, to address, and, more than all, to touch you, has
been a rapture, what word can I find in the vocabulary of happiness
to express the realisation of that hope which now burns within me--to
mingle our youth together into one stream, wheresoever it flows; to
respire the same breath; to be almost blent in the same existence; to
grow, as it were, on one stem, and knit into a single life the feelings,
the wishes, the being of both!

To-night I shall see you again: let one day m