And sighed MANDALLA to think that sinħsib » A Could dwell so fair a shrine within. bose dr "Oh, grief to think that she is one "Who like the breeze is wooed and won! "Yet sure it were a task for love "To come like dew of the night from above Upon her heart, and wash away, ་ "Like dust from the flowers, its stain of clay, "And win her back in her tears to heaven, "Pure, loved, and humble, and forgiven: "Yes! freed from the soil of her earthly thrall, "Her smile shall light up my starry hall!" The moonlight is on a little bower, With wall and with roof of leaf and of flower, Which heeds not how rude the storm may be. The jasmines their slender wreathings spread, The other with clusters of amber light; One with that pure but crimson flush By its side grew another one, Pale as the snow of the funeral stone; And the last had leaves like those leaves of gold And there were four vases, with blossoms filled, Like the spirit of music in ocean shells; That one most scorched by the summer's breath, MANDALLA lay; and by his side, They drank the softness of the breeze.- A light shawl now wreathed round her brow, Like a dark banner, swept behind; She answered the sigh of her soft lute-string;" "Yes, thou art mine!" MANDALLA said: "I have lighted up love in thy youthful heart; "I taught thee its tenderness, now I must teach "Its faith, its grief, and its gloomier part; "And then, from thy earth-stains purified, "In my star and my hall shalt thou reign my bride." It was an evening soft and fair, When, bearing spoils of leaf and flower, His face she let the blossoms fall: "Why I am jealous of thy dreams, "Awaken at thy Aza's call." No answer came from him whose tone She spoke again,-no words came forth; As pale, as cold, almost as dead! By the Ganges raised, for the morning sun Is a funeral pile,-around it stand "Now thou art mine! away, away "Maid of earth, MANDALLA is free to call 1 STANZAS. Ah! marvel not that wild the eye You tell me, friends conspire to break And yet you oft have talk'd of love, Say, is it by thy love's decay, That we are rent in twain? Perchance to mingle with the gay, And reckless seem as light as they, Nor deem it strange that deep the sigh THE ROOM THAT NEVER WAS USED. A RECOLLECTION OF CHILDHOOD. Charles Lamb has, with masterly hand, graphically pourtrayed the innate terrors of childhood: his delightful sketch, as I recently read it, coming completely home to my recollected ideas, feelings, and experiences, induced me to try if I could not make out a chapter of my own on the subject; and, without further preamble, here it is: 66 A feeble, highly nervous constitution, and what Washington Irving would style a haunted head," were the banes of my early existence; the sight of a mask, even though I beheld a person put it on, nearly sent me into fits; and the report of a gun, half terrified my soul from my body; I trembled (a species of nervousness to which I plead guilty even now), to turn over the leaves of a book, with whose plates I was unacquainted, for fear of coming to something frightful; and the representation of a skeleton, or volcanic eruption, would make me thrill with terror, not merely for hours afterwards, but whenever my eye fell on the alarming volume. I need not hint my dread of going about in the dark; that fear attaches to children less nervous than I happened to be; but houses there were (and one of these I am about to describe), old fashioned, large, rumbling, and lonely, into whose remote apartments I never willingly ventured, except with a companion, even in broad daylight. Had I been asked the causes of those thousand and one terrors which made the perplexing, nameless misery of my childhood, I could not have told; and, had I been, to use a favourite metonymy of my nurse-maid, “flayed alive," for this distressing timidity, the treatment, less cruel than the disease, would not have exorcised it from my "nervous system;" such terrors being, in fact, as involuntary as indefinite. My grandmother, on the paternal side, lived, as far back as I can recollect, in an old house, in an old city; under its roof I was born (though my residence was elsewhere in the same city), and this antique mansion, with its old-fashioned L. 37.2. R |