reason instead of ultimately
subverting it. This, however, he unhappily omitted to do, not because
he was at all ignorant that a strict sense of duty, and a due regard for
his daughter's welfare, demanded it; but because her distress, and the
childlike simplicity with which she cast herself upon his bosom, touched
his spirit, and drew forth all the affection of a parent who "loved not
wisely but too well."

Let not my readers, however, condemn him too harshly for this, for alas,
he paid, in the bitterness of a father's misery, a woeful and mysterious
penalty of a father's weakness. His beloved one went before, and the old
man could not remain behind her; but their sorrows have passed away, and
both now enjoy that peace, which, for the last few years of their lives,
the world did not give them.

From this time forth Jane's ear listened only to the music of a happy
heart, and her eye saw nothing but the beauty of that vision which shone
in her pure bosom like the star of evening in some limpid current that
glides smoothly between rustic meadows, on whose green banks the heart
is charmed into happiness by the distant hum of pastoral life.

Love however will not be long without its object, nor can the soul
be happy in the absence of its counterpart. For some time after the
interview in which the passion of our young lovers was revealed, Jane
found solitude to be the same solace to her love, that human sympathy is
to affliction. The certainty that she was now beloved, caused her heart
to lapse into those alternations of repose and enjoyment which above all
other states of feeling nourish its affections. Indeed the change was
surprising which she felt within her and around her. On looking back,
all that portion of her life that had passed before her attachment to
Osborne, seemed dark and without any definite purpose. She wondered at
it as at a mystery which she could not solve; it was only now that she
lived; her existence commenced, she thought, with her passion, and with
it only she was satisfied it could cease. Nature wore in her eyes a new
aspect, was clothed with such beauty, and breathed such a spirit of love
and harmony, as she only perceived now for the first time. Her parents
were kinder and better she thought than they had before appeared to her,
and her sisters and brother seemed endued with warmer affections and
blighter virtues than they had ever possessed. Every thing near her and
about her partook in a more e