Trevylyan (but he was a singular man), that being
naturally one whose affections it was very difficult to excite, he
should have fallen in love at first sight with a person whose disease,
already declared, would have deterred any other heart from risking
its treasures on a bark so utterly unfitted for the voyage of life.
Consumption, but consumption in its most beautiful shape, had set its
seal upon Gertrude Vane, when Trevylyan first saw her, and at once
loved. He knew the danger of the disease; he did not, except at
intervals, deceive himself; he wrestled against the new passion: but,
stern as his nature was, he could not conquer it. He loved, he confessed
his love, and Gertrude returned it.

In a love like this, there is something ineffably beautiful,--it is
essentially the poetry of passion. Desire grows hallowed by fear,
and, scarce permitted to indulge its vent in the common channel of
the senses, breaks forth into those vague yearnings, those lofty
aspirations, which pine for the Bright, the Far, the Unattained. It is
"the desire of the moth for the star;" it is the love of the soul!

Gertrude was advised by the faculty to try a southern climate; but
Gertrude was the daughter of a German mother, and her young fancy had
been nursed in all the wild legends and the alluring visions that
belong to the children of the Rhine. Her imagination, more romantic than
classic, yearned for the vine-clad hills and haunted forests which are
so fertile in their spells to those who have once drunk, even sparingly,
of the Literature of the North. Her desire strongly expressed, her
declared conviction that if any change of scene could yet arrest the
progress of her malady it would be the shores of the river she had so
longed to visit, prevailed with her physicians and her father, and they
consented to that pilgrimage along the Rhine on which Gertrude, her
father, and her lover were now bound.

It was by the green curve of the banks which the lovers saw from the
heights of Bruges that our fairy travellers met. They were reclining on
the water-side, playing at dominos with eye-bright and the black specks
of the trefoil; namely, Pipalee, Nip, Trip, and the lord treasurer
(for that was all the party selected by the queen for her travelling
_cortege_), and waiting for her Majesty, who, being a curious little
elf, had gone round the town to reconnoitre.

"Bless me!" said the lord treasurer; "what a mad freak is this! Crossing
that im