t opening for his talents, and both were agreed that
their separation should not be for long. And, indeed, before the end of
the year, Madame de Hell clasped her babe to her bosom, and set out to
join her husband.

Her poetical faculties were first stimulated by her voyage to the East.
Previously she had cherished a deep love for nature, for the music of
verse, for nobility of thought, but had made no attempt to define and
record her impressions. The isles and shores of the Mediterranean, with
their myriad charms and grand historic associations:--

"That great mid-sea that moans with memories,"[4]

loosened her genius, so to speak, and stimulated her to clothe her
feelings and sentiments in a metrical form. It is not difficult to
understand the effect which, on a warm imagination and sensitive
temperament, that richly-coloured panorama of "the isles of Greece," and
that exquisite prospect of Constantinople and the Golden Horn, would
necessarily produce. For some time, as she herself tells us, she lived
in a kind of moral and intellectual intoxication; she was absorbed in an
ideal world, which bewildered while it delighted her.

The plague was then dealing heavily with the unfortunate Mussulman
populations, but it did not terrify our enthusiastic travellers; as if
they bore a charmed life, they went to and fro, seeing whatever was fine
or memorable, and yet all unable to satisfy that thirst for beauty which
the beautiful around them had excited. Madame de Hell was under the
influence of a subtle spell; her quick fancy was profoundly impressed by
the picturesque aspects of Oriental life, by its glow of colour and
grace of form, so different from the commonplace and monotonous
realities of the West. She seemed to be living in the old days of the
Khalifs--those days which the authors of the "Thousand and One Stories"
have immortalized--to be living, for example, in the "golden prime of
good Haroun Al-Raschid"--as she saw before her the motley procession of
veiled women, Persians with their pointed bonnets, Hindu jugglers with
lithe lissom figures, negro slaves, grey-bearded beggars looking like
princes in disguise, and Armenians wrapped in their long furred cloaks.
She delighted, accompanied by her husband, to explore the silent
recesses of the hilly and almost solitary streets in the less frequented
quarters of Stamboul, where a latticed window or a half-open door would
suggest a romance of love and mystery, or a vi