clouds, (called di
Foligno,) and at the same instant illuminated the whole principal figure
in the Transfiguration of Raffaelle; floating as it does, and tending
almost with a movement upward, in the air of 'the high mountain' where the
miracle took place----as these two grand paintings then stood, side by
side, in the solemn, in the holy quiet of that lofty and sequestered
apartment. O moment! never to be forgotten, never to be obscured by any
lapse of after time!

And thus, although in a less palpable world, do these two passages of
immortal verse, wearing each its beam of golden light, stand in their
effulgence before the sympathies of the observer alive to the charms and
influences of moral beauty! Surely no other poet has the world produced
comparable to Shakspeare for the revelation of the love of the yet
unwedded girl; and who is there to be named with Milton, in the tenderness
and truth with which he has touched upon conjugal relationship; and that
necessity, that inappeasable requirement of intercommunion that
accompanies, as its immediate consequence, the sacrament of the nuptial
rite where there is destined to exist the real, the progressive, the
indissoluble intermarriage of soul with soul!

How effectually and with what truth does the dramatic Bard raise the veil
and exhibit to us the imagination of this retired girl, bred up in all the
deep earnestness of mind that a country life and comparative seclusion
could induce, dwelling and brooding over the form of one individual
brought into intimate association with her, 'seeing him every hour' where
she had little else to interest her, nor any thing to contemplate, but, as
she says,

'sit and draw
His arched brows, his hawking eye, his curls,
In our heart's table; heart too capable
Of every trick and line of his sweet favour.

* * * * *

----it hurts not him
That he is loved of me: I follow him not
With any token of presumptuous suit.
I know I love in vain, strive against hope,
Yet, in this captious and intenible sieve,
I still pour in the waters of my love
And lack not to love still.'

Behold her as she sits, the beautiful creation!--delighting to magnify the
qualities of the idol of her affections and to depreciate herself in the
comparison; overlooking, perhaps incapable of once imagining the thought
of his harsh and selfish and impracticable nature, and co