se of
Carlos. Few situations of a more affecting kind can be imagined, than
the situation of this young, generous and ill-fated prince. From
boyhood his heart had been bent on mighty things; he had looked upon
the royal grandeur that awaited his maturer years, only as the means
of realising those projects for the good of men, which his beneficent
soul was ever busied with. His father's dispositions, and the temper
of the court, which admitted no development of such ideas, had given
the charm of concealment to his feelings; his life had been in
prospect; and we are the more attached to him, that deserving to be
glorious and happy, he had but expected to be either. Bright days,
however, seemed approaching; shut out from the communion of the Albas
and Domingos, among whom he lived a stranger, the communion of another
and far dearer object was to be granted him; Elizabeth's love seemed
to make him independent even of the future, which it painted with
still richer hues. But in a moment she is taken from him by the most
terrible of all visitations; his bride becomes his mother; and the
stroke that deprives him of her, while it ruins him forever, is more
deadly, because it cannot be complained of without sacrilege, and
cannot be altered by the power of Fate itself. Carlos, as the poet
represents him, calls forth our tenderest sympathies. His soul seems
once to have been rich and glorious, like the garden of Eden; but the
desert-wind has passed over it, and smitten it with perpetual blight.
Despair has overshadowed all the fair visions of his youth; or if he
hopes, it is but the gleam of delirium, which something sterner than
even duty extinguishes in the cold darkness of death. His energy
survives but to vent itself in wild gusts of reckless passion, or
aimless indignation. There is a touching poignancy in his expression
of the bitter melancholy that oppresses him, in the fixedness of
misery with which he looks upon the faded dreams of former years, or
the fierce ebullitions and dreary pauses of resolution, which now
prompts him to retrieve what he has lost, now withers into
powerlessness, as nature and reason tell him that it cannot, must not
be retrieved.

Elizabeth, no less moving and attractive, is also depicted with
masterly skill. If she returns the passion of her amiable and once
betrothed lover, we but guess at the fact; for so horrible a thought
has never once been whispered to her own gentle and spotless mind. Yet