est statuary: an image of more perfect
loveliness never glanced through a lady's lattice. She carelessly
took up her cithern. A few wild chords flew from her touch. She bent
her head towards the instrument, as if wooing its melody--the
vibrations that crept to her heart. She hummed a low and plaintive
descant, mournful and tender as her own thoughts. The tone and feeling
of the ballad we attempt to preserve in the following shape:--

SONG.

I.

"It is the stream,
Singing to the cold moon with babbling tongue;
Yet, ah! not half so wildly as the song
Of my heart's dream.
Is not my love most beautiful, thou moon?
Though pale as hope delayed;
Methought, beneath his feet the wild-flowers played
Like living hearts in tune.

2.

"We stood alone:
Then, as he drew the dark curls from my sight,
Through his transparent hand and arm of light,
The far skies shone.
List! 'twas the dove.
It seemed the echo of his own fond tone;
Sweet as the hymn of seraphs round the throne
Of hope and love!"

But the moon was not the object of her love. Ladies are little apt to
become enamoured of such a fit emblem of their own fickle and
capricious humours; and yet, somebody she loved, but he was invisible!
Probably her wild and fervid imagination had created a form--pictured
it to the mind, and endowed it with her own notions of excellence and
perfection: precisely the same as love in the ordinary mode, with this
difference only--to wit, the object is a living and breathing
substance, around which these haloes of the imagination are thrown;
whereas, in the case of which we are speaking, the lady's ideal image
was transferred to a being she had never seen.

It was but a short period before the commencement of our narrative
that Eleanor Byron was really in love, and for the first time; for
though her cousin Oliver, as she usually called him, had stormed, and
perchance carried the outworks, yet the citadel was impregnable and
unapproached. But she knew not that it was love. A soft and pleasing
impression stole insensibly upon her, then dejection and melancholy.
Her heart was vacant, and she sighed for an object, and for its
possession. It was a silly wish, but so it was, gentle reader; and
beware thou fall not in love with thine own dreams, for sure enough it
was but a vision, bright, mysterious, and bewitching, that ent