o a family of the high-born.

Sworn Brother of our soul! during the bright ardours of boyhood, when
the present was all-sufficient in its own bliss, the past soon
forgotten, and the future unfeared, what might have been thy lot,
beloved Harry Wilton, had thy span of life been prolonged to this very
day? Better--oh! far better was it for thee and thine that thou didst so
early die; for it seemeth that a curse is on that lofty lineage; and
that, with all their genius, accomplishments, and virtues, dishonour
comes and goes, a familiar and privileged guest, out and in their house.
Shame never veiled the light of those bold eyes, nor tamed the
eloquence of those sunny lips, nor ever for a single moment bowed down
that young princely head that, like a fast-growing flower, seemed each
successive morning to be visibly rising up towards a stately manhood.
But the time was not far distant, when to thee life would have undergone
a rueful transformation. Thy father, expatriated by the spells of a
sorceress, and forced into foreign countries, to associate with vice,
worthlessness, profligacy, and crime! Thy mother, dead of a broken
heart! And that lovely sister, who came to the Manse with her jewelled
hair--But all these miserable things who could prophesy, at the hour
when we and the weeping villagers laid thee, apart from the palace and
the burial-vault of thy high-born ancestors, without anthem or
organ-peal, among the humble dead? Needless and foolish were all those
floods of tears. In thy brief and beautiful course, nothing have we who
loved thee to lament or condemn. In few memories, indeed, doth thy image
now survive; for in process of time what young face fadeth not away from
eyes busied with the shows of this living world? What young voice is not
bedumbed to ears for ever filled with its perplexing din? Yet thou,
Nature, on this glorious May-day, rejoicing in all the plenitude of thy
bliss--we call upon thee to bear witness to the intensity of our
never-dying grief! Ye fields, that long ago we so often trode together,
with the wind-swept shadows hovering about our path--Ye streams, whose
murmur awoke our imaginations, as we lay reading, or musing together in
day-dreams, among the broomy braes--Ye woods, where we started at the
startled cushat, or paused, without a word, to hear the creature's
solitary moans and murmurs deepening the far-off hush, already so
profound--Ye moors and mosses, black yet beautiful, with your
peat-