to everything--retained me
spell-bound. But, on the performers, and their circle of hearers, the
effect was indescribable. All the world knows, that there is nothing
which revives memories like music. Those were the airs which they had
heard and sung from their infancy; the airs of their early
companionships, hopes, and perhaps loves; sung in their gardens, their
palaces, at their parents' knees, by the cradles of their children, at
their firesides, every where combining with the heart. Sung now in their
exile, they brought back to each heart some recollection of the happiest
scenes and fondest ties of its existence. No power of poetry, nor even
of the pencil, could have brought the past so deeply, so touchingly,
with such living sensibility, before them. _There_ at least, was no
acting, no display, no feigned feeling--their country, their friends,
the perils of husband and brother in the field, the anguish, almost the
agony, of woman's affection--and what can equal that affection?--was in
the gestures and countenances of all before me. Some wept silently and
abundantly; some buried their faces on their knees, and by the heaving
of their bosoms alone, showed how they felt; some sat with their large
eyes fixed on heaven, and their lips moving as in silent prayer; some
almost knelt, with hands clasped and eyes bent down, in palpable
supplication. Stranger as I was to them and theirs, it was painful even
to me. I felt myself doubly an intruder, and was thinking how I might
best glide away, when I saw Mariamne, in an attempt like my own, to
move, suddenly fall at the feet of the duchess. She had fainted. I
carried her into the open air, where she soon recovered. "Do you wish to
return, Mariamne?" said I. She looked at me with amazement. "Return! It
would kill me. Let us go home." I placed her on her horse, and we moved
quietly and sadly away.

"That was a strange scene," said I, after a long interval of silence.

"Very," was the laconic reply.

"I am afraid it distressed you," I observed.

"I would not have seen it for any consideration, if I could have known
what it was;" she answered with a new gush of tears. "Yet what must my
feelings be to theirs? They lose every thing."

"But they bear the loss nobly. Still they have not lost all, when they
can excite such sympathy in the mind of England. They have found at
least an asylum; but what was the object of this singular meeting?"

"Oh, who can tell what they are dreami