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of joy and thankfulness. And the young Antonio grew under his parents tender love into all that was good and hopeful. His mother loved to look on the soft melancholy of his dark eyes, and read therein the soul of his father; but Alfonso gazed anxiously on their pensive cast, and wished they had more of his mother's sweet joyousness.

A daughter came next to gladden the young mother's heart, and from her earliest infancy her beauty was something almost unearthly. Her girlhood brought with each year increasing loveliness-but, alas! what was the anguish of the mother, the silent grief of the father, to find that the light of reason illumined not this matchless form. Her large soft blue eyes were sometimes fixed in imploring earnestness on the faces of her parents, as though they asked something the tongue could not express; at other times they danced with sparkling laughter, but they were ever wild and strange-her transparent cheek knew no tinge of the rose, save when she suddenly encountered one she

un

loved, then would the crimson blood flush, and as quickly fail from her face;-her full ripe lips were ever slightly apart, as though they sought to give utterance to some thought, but, alas! the tongue refused to perform its office. She was dumb, and no words came, but sweet, low wailing sounds;-her fairy form was cast in perfect symmetry, and it was a beautiful, though sad sight, to watch her chasing the gay butterflies along the forest paths. Her love for her brother was bounded; she would cling to his arm, and look up in his face with her bright unmeaning eyes for minutes together, and when he composing poetry, and wrapt in musing, she would surround him with sweet smelling flowers, and sit silently weaving garlands at his feet; she was ever at his side like some stray angel, and his heart mourned and yearned over her with a painful depth of tenderness. Thus years rolled on, and Antonio attained his twentieth year, and was in the full spring

was

VOL. I.

C

of manly beauty, and the poor idiot was but a year younger, when a dire and sweeping fever came into the valley, borne on the wings of some blighting wind; and fearful was its devastation; the young and the healthy fell with the aged and sickly. At length it spread its baneful influence around the dwelling of Alfonso. The first victim was the dumb girl; her frail life was extinguished with scarce an effort. Her round cheek glowed with a scarlet flush, her bright eyes glared with more than usual brightness -- then all faded and she was gone. Scarcely was her loved form laid in the cold grave, when Alfonso sickened and drooped. For the first time in her life, his agonized wife dared to arraign Providence, and give herself up to despair. She wrung her hands in frantic anguish as she watched the dreadful symptoms developing themselves in that idolized being. Alternately she raved, and wept, and prayed, or tried to pray, but fate had marked him, and he went-and she

fell to the earth, stricken unto death - not by the pestilential breath of the fever, but by that surer destroyer, grief for the lost. Antonio laid them in one grave.

CHAPTER II.

Would we two had been twins of the same mother,
Or, that the name my heart lent to another
Could be a sister's bond for her and thee,
Blending two beams of one eternity!

Yet were one lawful and the other true,

These names, though dear, could paint not, as is due,

How beyond refuge I am thine! Ah me!
I am not thine. I am a part of thee!

Art thou not void of guile,

A lovely soul formed to be blest and bless,
A well of sealed and secret happiness,
Whose waters like blithe light and music are,
Vanquishing dissonance and gloom? A star
Which moves not in the moving heavens, alone?
A smile amid dark frowns? A gentle tone
Amid rude voices? a beloved light?

SHELLEY.

THE first utter and bitter desolation of grief cannot last for ever, since nothing is immortal here below; and Antonio Cellini, like a young

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