It was an apotheosis of nature! a farewell to the universe! It is probable that, feeling her end approach, she had gone down into the breakfast-room early in the morning to play this pathetic dirge; for she was found in a large arm-chair, her fingers extended, as though in the act of touching the piano. Those who discovered her thus, supposed she slept; for the pleasure of the music, and the thoughts that had inspired the air, yet lingered on her countenance, and lit it up with a faint smile. Half hoping, yet fearing to awaken her, they might, with Lear, have applied a mirror to her mouth to see whether her breath would dim its lustre. No! that slumber was her last; her spirit had fled to Him who gave it. In losing her sister, Julia had lost all the objects of life. To whom could she now communicate her most secret thoughts; make them intelligible even without words, comprehended by a glance? The books they used to read together, she could not open them without finding some passage one had marked to show the other. The instrument, she could not bear its tones; the duets they had played, the airs they had sung, all the inanimate things in the room, the vacant chair, the unfinished embroidery, her own sketch still lingering in the glass, where it was Caroline's habit to put whatever last had pleased her, so as to have it constantly before her eyes, recalled to her remorseless memory the recollection of her irreparable loss. Even the face of nature seemed changed: those views on which she had gazed with rapture had lost all their charm. The little garden which Caroline had laid out; the flowers she had planted, and watered; the whispering among the leaves, the ripple of the waves on the sea-shore, the song of the birds, were all associated with her, and did but nourish her grief, and make her solitude more lonely. Oh! let one who would seek to extinguish unavailing recollections fly from the scenes of former happiness! Two months elapsed, and the general and his surviving daughter had changed their abode for a villa at Tor. Time, that heals all but compunctious visitings of conscience, had begun to pour its opiate on the soul of Julia. Sighs and tears are the safety-valves of nature; they are the balm of the wounded spirit, like the tenderness of a mother, or the sympathy of an affectionate friend. Her health, too, had begun to improve, and all the worst of her symptoms to disappear, when there arrived at Torbay one of those missionaries, those disciples of the new Whitfield, who, under the mask of adherence to the rites of the established church, preach the desolating doctrines of election and grace-doctrines that overthrew the intellect, and poisoned the life, of one of the most amiable, beneficent, and virtuous of mankind, the infatuated Cowper. This missionary was a man of fifty, with a face in whose hard and strongly marked features were visible the traces of early passions, the violence of which might have driven him into the commission of any crime,-passions that had been smothered, not extinguished, by the cold and calculating dictates of worldly prudence. The inward consciousness of his own sinful nature made him conceive that all the imaginations of the heart are evil, that all hearts are full of concupiscence and the long catalogue of offences which the Apostle enumerates. Continual mortification and penance, and the exercise of prayer, had made him mistake habit for faith, and belief for conviction; I will acquit him of the hypocrisy of the Pharisee. He was no Tartuffe, such as Molière has drawn, for his zeal and fanaticism were alike indisputable: a zeal for adding to his little flock; and a fanaticism that, leading him step by step to construe to the strict letter, and torture to his own interpretation, the parable of the potter's vessel, and a few texts that had a general application in early days of Christianity, made him implicitly believe that, with the partiality of a father for one child over another, the God by whom he was called to the ministry to preach, had pre-ordained and selected himself, and a chosen few, to complete the number of the elect, whilst all the rest of mankind were irrevocably and irremediably removed out of the pale of salvation. Such is the human mind, that by intense application and abstraction, by continually brooding on one subject, it can place blind credence in any doctrine, however absurd. It was not long before, with a spirit of proselytism, he found out Julia. It is said that the heart is never more disposed for a new attachment than at the moment when the object on which it doted is gone for ever, and that the grave is not one of the affections; Lady Jane Grey is a satire on the sex-a libel on woman. This desolating sentiment is only entertained by those who have never felt the sacred power of love, who have mistaken passion for affection, the joys of the senses for the mystical union of souls. But when all earthly things fail to supply the void in hearts that have once beat with love or affection, they look for consolation in the thoughts of heaven; they seek for things above the earth rather than of it. Never was there a being in an apter state to imbibe the poison which the tempter was bent on instilling than the devoted Julia. As soon as he became a guest of the house, one selfish feeling swallowed up the rest; religious enthusiasm took possession of her; distracting doubts destroyed the serenity of her soul. At their first conferences, he expressed himself shocked at her utter ignorance of all the tenets of the true faith-at the heathen course of her life; told her she was a stray lamb gone out of the way, that her malady was a just infliction of Providence for sins of omission or commission, that she should consider it as a salutary ordeal through which she should gain the road to salvation. In order to fit her for another world, he enjoined her to wean her affections from all that this contained, to seclude herself from all intercourse with her fellows, and renounce the society of her friends. The love of nature he considered idolatry; her elegant pursuits frivolous, and unworthy a candidate for heaven; he said that by prayer and prostration she should struggle to receive grace divine, and to obtain the conviction that her calling and election were sure. Such were the doctrines that served to embitter and disturb the remaining hours of this victim of bigotry. "La mort," says a French writer, "rencontre un puissant auxiliaire dans le moral, quand il se trouve gravement attiré." Thus her disease now made a rapid progress; the worm that preyed on her vitals daily made greater inroads on her constitution, and it was clear that a few weeks would lay her by the side of her sister. She had till now, in the presence of her father, assumed a cheerfulness, even if she felt it not, and greeted him with a smile of returning happiness; and, however painful the effort it cost, had attended to the affairs of his household. But a change came over her spirit. During the last visit I paid her, she looked more like the Magdalen of Guido than the Madonna of Raphael. Her eyes were red with weeping; over the natural paleness of her cheek was spread a flush, less of bodily disease than the fever of her mind. She appeared lost in a self-abstraction that eclipsed all external objects, and discovered no light within; such as the fanatic in the exaltation of his fervour finds, to compensate for the lost brightness of the world. For some days before her death, she abode in perfect darkness, and would not even see her father: she refused all sorts of sustenance, or to take her accustomed medicine; and with feeble voice, that inanition rendered more like a murmur or a sound, was heard at intervals muttering accents of despair. This could not last long. She was found with her hands clasped in the attitude of supplication, in which she died. Her head was bent back on the pillow, and her eyes were raised to heaven. As these sisters were united in their lives, so far were they in the manner of their death that no one received their last sigh. These details have little that is dramatic in them, they are scenes that have nothing to recommend them but their fidelity; yet they are not without a moral lesson. I have lately made a pilgrimage to the graves of the Two Sisters, and have thought that they should not perish without some humble record to save their memories from oblivion. I remembered the words of a great poet, and said with a sigh, when two such spirits pass away, "The world seems sensible of a change: They leave behind a cold tranquillity, Death and the grave, that are not as they were!" ANACREONTIC. EROS, god of love, I'll bring Where's the eye that shines as clear Eros, god of love, I'll bring M. L. THE DOCK-YARD GHOST. BY RICHARD JOHNS. It was a dull and rainy afternoon in a dreary sea-port town: the very waves came in sluggishly, as if they found it too much trouble to wash the shores; while the idle winds wantonly played with their rippling curls, instead of blowing them up for neglect of duty. I do not mean to say that the borough of Dockarton was a dirty town, and wanted more purification than other communities of men; far be it from me to make so unkind an assertion: but Mr. Mouscribe's Guide to the beauties of "this ancient port and its neighbourhood" makes particular mention that its shores are "washed by the boundless deep," and I am old soldier enough to require contracts to be properly performed. The eventful day the incident occurred which has made me turn scribbler, was in the autumn of 18-, not many years after the close of that ever-to-be-remembered European war which covered England with national glory and national debt, and entitled her to that continental gratitude which, I am inclined to think, was incontinently forgotten. The town I refer to, had greatly flourished during the struggle of kingdoms; for it possesses, as Mr. Mouscribe has it, "a dock-yard where the giant oak of England is hollowed and squared, and fashioned to stem the heaving tide, and go forth the mighty bulwark of our native land." Dockarton in the war-time was consequently a bustling sea-port, and had a large garrison of veterans and militia, together with a goodly population of sailors and slop-sellers, innkeepers and outfitters, pimps, crimps, and prize-agents, tailors, hatters, wine, brandy, and provision merchants among the sterner sex; while the ladies boasted a miscellaneous assemblage, which, for the most part, had better be imagined than described. Peace arrived, and in a short time grass was actually discovered growing in the streets. Ships were no longer launched, and but rarely commissioned or paid off; Jack now seldom came capering on shore" with money in both pockets; the Jews' watches were at a discount, as it was no longer the fashion to buy them by the halfdozen; and when a five-pound note was cashed for a new hat, it had ceased to be usual to "d- the change!" Tailors now were too busily engaged looking after old bills to entertain old customers with champagne luncheons; hotels were shutting up, or dwindling into pot-houses; and shops once abandoned by their tenants remained unoccupied. Change followed upon change; even the veterans and militia departed, and in their place his Majesty's - regiment did duty on the dismantled lines, silent saluting-batteries, but still noisy dockyard of Dockarton. The reader will now understand why I called this a dreary town. I believe it has since, in some degree, recovered from the sudden effects of the peace; but stupid enough it was when Ensign Augustus S looked from the windows of the King's Head Inn at the drizzling rain which begreased the pavements of the principal street in Dockarton. Bitterly he cursed the showers which had converted a fine morning into a wet afternoon, and prevented a certain damsel with whom he was desperately enamoured, from keeping an appointment duly made in a meetinghouse the Sunday before. The fair Mary called herself a nursery-governess, and it is certain she governed the nursery of a family in the vicinity: but though "Master Bobby" and "Miss Emma" were too old to carry, they were yet rather young to learn; and, not speaking their native tongue with fluency, it is probable they did not trouble their protectress by entering into the component parts of the language. Be this as it may, it pleased the nursery-maid to aspire to the dignity of governess; and Ensign Augustus cared not to oppose or contradict her, as, clad in mufti, he would stroll beside his innamorata and her young charge, when the weather and her mistress permitted them to take the air. On the present occasion the pretty Mary was prevented froin meeting her lover by the rain; and the ensign was consequently out of temper with himself, with her, with the whole world, and everybody in it. After having proposed other terms of capitulation in vain, he had just determined on a mésalliance with Miss Mary, in sovereign contempt for the prejudices of his forebears, who had made it their custom to marry in their own station of life; and the sooner he informed his gentle enslaver, the sooner Ensign Augustus thought his heart would be at rest. The only way of unburthening his mind was to embody his honourable proposal in a letter; but this seemed a plan of proceeding which, with a latent dread of a possible action for breach of promise of marriage, he hesitated to adopt. Brooding over his disappointment, he finished his sherry and sandwich; sauntered to a billiard-room, where he made two or three foolish bets, losing his money with a still greater profusion of his temper; and from thence lounged to his quarters. Here we will leave him playing Robin Adair, Dulce, Dulce Domum, with other heart-inthralling airs, on his German flute, whiling away tedious moments till the mess-hour; and transport ourselves to the royal dock-yard of Dockarton. It is the evening of the same day, eventful in the records of the regiment, to which our gallant friend belonged, and Tom Mason, a full private in the ensign's own company, is on sentry in a retired part of the "Yard." It was still "very dubersome weather," as Tom remarked to himself as he walked to and fro before his box. The rain had ceased, and the moon seemed making up her mind to shine, as if in attempt to dry the wet-blanket-looking clouds that hung around her heavenbuilt hall. Not a soul was stirring in the dock-yard—at least not to the eye of Tom Mason-except a brother sentry on a distant jetty, when the clock chimed the half-hour past eight. Twenty bells now took up the sound as they were set going by the hands of the civil watch-worthy old men !-showing that they were not yel gone to sleep, whatever might happen; while sentinel answered to sentinel, and watchman to watchman, in one long continuous cry of " All's well!" which, echoing in the distance, died into silence. I have said Tom's post was in a very retired part of the "Yard," and have further to mention that the place was "banned with an evil name." Whether some "Jack the Painter's" wandering ghost really visited "the glimpses of the moon" in that particular quarter, I cannot take on me to say; but certain it is that several soldiers declared they had beheld a figure pass them that would give neither An incendiary known by that name, executed, about the year 1776, for firing Portsmouth dock-yard. |