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without disclosing the mystery which hung over its further course. A grove of limes and acacias, which skirted the left bank, revealed enough, however, to indicate its direction; for over their dark tops, and in their intervals, the eye caught glimpses of domes and towers, gleaming in the last flash of daylight. The lights were beginning to glance along the heights of Saint Sebastian; and the spire of its chapel shone like a star, above the loftiest summit, in the departing glory. The vesper chimes had ceased, but the great bell of the cathedral boomed slowly and heavily on the ear. A short interval-one little hour (for we paused to enjoy the scene, ere we turned the point), and Lyons-my own adopted Lyons-the beauty of Southern France,-lay before me; with her old Roman amphitheatre, and all her princely palaces and splendid temples revealed in the brightening moonlight;-stretching her arms across the waters to her suburban subjects; and watching, like a presiding genius, the union of " the arrowy Rhone" with his river-bride!

Lyons is fallen now!-changed indeed, since the day when she was to me a "city of the heart!" Yet I dwell upon these recollections, and upon all connected with her, as upon the one bright vision of my youth-a dream of most pervading beauty. It is painful to think how long and lingeringly such dreams haunt us, from their very infrequency. I have

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at times thought that there was something in the soft and soothed feelings with which, as a stranger, I approached Lyons, prophetic of all that she was destined to be to me. But I believe I mistake, as we are often fond to do, causes for effects; and that to the tranquillity which had taken place of the long tempest of passion in my breast, before I reached this home, is to be ascribed much of that influence which it gained over me, as immediately associated with such a change :-the young heart has a power of investing all around it with its own inward charm, and transferring to outward objects that beauty and harmony which it finds within itself!

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I spent three years in Lyons. There, first, did I seek a resting-place, after months of painful wandering; and there, first, did I find friends, and gaze sweet familiar faces," after I had been led, in the feverish and festering agony of a bruised spirit, to abjure the one and the other. It was there that I first learnt to look calmly back upon the past, and to think, without madness, on the loss of the dead, and-bitterer far-the coldness of the living! From a life that has been darkened by many sorrows, and shaken by many storms, I am fond of singling out these three years, as my little era of peace. I turn to Lyons, as it then was,-and as it is no more,-as to a spring in the long desert of my existence; beside which I lingered a little while, and left it, to find,

in all my journey, no fountain of equal freshness, and no spot of such soft repose. Hence it is that every thing belonging to my residence there is so distinctly traced in a memory, dim and uncertain on all other subjects, and apt to lose the detail of its sorrows, in one gloomy generalization. There were many things, besides, in the situation and circumstances of Lyons, at that time, which my imagination is ever resting upon, and using for its own purposes. That dreadful tempest which had visited France, in the preceding summer, with a violence which has no parallel in the annals of Europe, and that utter blight of the husbandman's hopes which attended it, had been less severely felt in the Lionois than in most other parts of France; and her many sources of wealth, by means of her extended commerce, had left her less exposed to its more melancholy consequences. Those principles, too, which were beginning to spread from the capital, over all the northern departments, and which ultimately led to the bloodiest scene in the whole drama of civilized existence, had not yet spread their dark shade over the sunny south. All was peace, and tranquillity, and joy. There were no signs betokening that time, so near at hand, when the squares of Lyons, filled with her bravest and her best, were to be swept with grape-shot; and her blue river with its bright shores, to echo the cries of the thousands

who were launched upon their mysterious journey, along its waters. This exemption from ill, in troubled seasons, acting upon a heart which had already found peace within its walls, had taught me to look upon the town of my adoption, as some fairyland of repose, far removed from the tempests of the world. The very fate which awaited it, though directly calculated to destroy such dreaming impressions, has, by that strange inconsistency with which ardent temperaments cherish their favourite theories, increased and perpetuated the impression of love with which I look back on this second home. I have visited it in its widowhood;-visited it since its walls were torn down, and its lofty structures laid in the dust; and I could not know it, in its mourning. I have sought the place which I loved in youth, and -I found it not! This is the stratagem by which my heart contrives to escape, from the contemplation of its decay. I look back upon Lyons, aз upon a mere dream, which belonged only to my youth;-as upon something utterly vanished and gone. There are hours when I sit and picture it to myself as a little magical world, to which I have lost the clue; when I think it may still be existingbright as in my brain-like another Amharan valley, in some spot apart from the realities of life;-shut out, like a lost paradise, from mortal reach., These are day-dreams, indeed; but I have learnt to love

day-dreams; and, as I am not fond of having my illusions broken, I have never since revisited Lyons. I will see it no more. Such was my determination, the last time I ever gazed on the lovely and lonely town, from the overhanging heights of St. Sebastian; and with this resolution, I sought, once more, all its scenes of early association, which the spoiler had left untouched. My first and last visits were to the grave of Aline Lorraine.*

T. K. H.

Her story will be found in a subsequent portion of this volume.

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