Lady Morgan

“ I cannot well tell you what the Lady Glorvina is, for she is like nothing upon the face of God’s creation but herself. I do not know how it comes to pass, that every mother’s soul of us loves her better nor the Prince; ay, by my conscience, and fear her too; for well may they fear her, on the score of her great learning, being brought up by Father John, the chaplain, and spouting Latin faster nor the priest of the parish: and we may well love her, for she is a saint upon earth, and a great physicianer to boot; curing all the sick and maimed for twenty miles round. ”

“ Once we were everywhere, and by all, justly famed for our patriotism, ardour of affection, love of letters, skill in arms and arts, and refinement of manners; but no sooner did there arise a connexion between us and a sister country, than the reputed virtues and well-earned glory of the Irish sunk at once into oblivion: as if (continued this enthusiastic Milesian, rising from his seat with all his native vehemence,) —as if the moral world was subject to those convulsions which shake the natural to its centre, burying by a single shock the monumental splendours of countless ages. ”

“ I am to become an object of popular favour and royal esteem; and all this time, in the fancied triumph of his parental hopes, he sees not that the heart of their object is breaking.
Were you to hear him! were you to see him. What a father! what a man! Such intelligence—such abilities. A mind so dignified—a heart so tender! and still retaining all the ardour, all the enthusiasm of youth. In what terms he spoke of my elected bride! He indeed dwelt chiefly on her personal charms, and the simplicity of her unmodified character. Alas! I once found both united to genius and sensibility. ”

“ How readily the mind adopts the phraseology of habit, when the sentiment it once clothed no longer exists. Would that my past pursuits were even in recollection, the aspect of enjoyments. But even my memory has lost its character of energy, and the past, like the present, appears one unwearied scence of chill and vapid existence. No sweet point of reflection seizes on the recollective powers. No actual joy woos my heart’s participation, and no prospect of future felicity glows on the distant vista of life, or awakens the quick throb of hope and expectation; all is cold, sullen and dreary. ”

“ Two hours had elapsed before the venerable priest again sought the two objects dearest to his heart; he found Glorvina overwhelmed with soft emotion, her cheek covered with blushes, and her hand clasped in that of the interesting invalid, whose flushing colour and animated eyes spoke the return of health and happiness; not indeed confirmed, but fed by sanguine hope; such hope as the heart of a mourning child could give to the object of her heart’s first passion, in that era of filial grief, when sorrow is mellowed by reason, and soothed by religion into a tender but not ungracious melancholy. ”

“ Yesterday, in the absence of the priest, I read to her as she drew. After a thousand little symptoms of impatience and weariness—“here,” said she, yawning—“here is a straight line I can make nothing of—do you know, Mr. Mortimer, I never could draw a perpendicular line in my life. See now my pencil will go into a curve or an angle; so you must guide my hand, or I shall——”
I “guide her hand to draw a straight line!”
“Nay then,” said I, with the ostentatious gravity of a pedagogue master, “I may as well do the drawing myself.”
“Well then,” said she, playfully, “do it yourself.” ”

“ Nothing can be more delightful than the evenings passed in this vengolf—-this hall of Woden; where my sweet Glorvina hovers round us, like one of the beautiful valkyries of the Gothic paradise, who bestow on the spirit of the departed warrior that heaven he eagerly rushes on death to obtain. Sometimes she accompanies the old bard on her harp, or with her voice; and frequently as she sits at her wheel (for she is often engaged in this simple and primitive avocation,) endeavours to lure, her father to speak on those subjects most interesting to him or to me ”

“ If I recollect right, somebody has defined genius to be ‘the various powers of a strong mind directed to one point:’ making it the result of combined force, not the vital source, whence all intellectual powers flow; in which light, the genius of Glorvina has ever appeared to me as a beam from heaven, an emanation of divine intelligence, whose nutritive warmth cherishes into existence that richness and variety of talent which wants only a little care to rear it to perfection. ”

“ The priest transfixed with pity and amazement let fall the sacred volume from his hands. Emotions of an indescribable nature mingled in the countenance of the bridegroom. The priest was the first to dissolve the spell, and to recover a comparative presence of mind; he descended from the altar and endeavoured to raise and extricate the lifeless Glorvina from the arms of her unhappy lover, but the effort was vain. Clasping her to his heart closer than ever, the almost frantic M———— exclaimed, “She is mine! mine in the eye of heaven! and no human power can part us!” ”

“ Surely, virtue would not be the less attractive for being united to genius and the graces.
But to return to the never-to-be-forgotten first of May! Early in the evening the Prince, his daughter, the priest, the bard, the old nurse, and indeed all the household of Inismore, adjourned to the vale, which being the only level ground on the peninsula, is always appropriated to the sports of the rustic neighbours. It was impossible I should enter this vale without emotion; and when I beheld it crowded with the vulgar throng, I felt as if it were profanation for the
“Sole of unblest feet!” ”

“ He continued brushing an intrusive tear from his eye; and the next moment whistling a lively air, he advanced to his cow, talking to her in Irish, in a soothing tone, and presenting her with such wild flowers and blades of grass as the scanty vegetation of the bog afforded, turned round to me with a smile of self-satisfaction and said, “One can better suffer themselves a thousand times over, than see one’s poor dumb beast want: it is next, please your Honour, to seeing one’s child in want—God help him who has witnessed both!” ”

“ In the original Irish poems, if my fancy is sometimes dazzled by the brilliant flashes of native genius, if my heart is touched by the strokes of nature, or my soul elevated by sublimity of sentiment, yet my interest is often destroyed, and my admiration often checked, by relations so wildly improbable, by details so ridiculously grotesque, that though these stand forth as the most undeniable proofs of their authenticity and the remoteness of the day in which they were composed, yet I reluctantly suffer my mind to be convinced at the expense of my feeling and my taste. ”

“ The absence of the good priest left me to a solitary dinner. Glorvina (as is usual with her) spent the first part of the evening in her father’s room; and thus denied her society, I endeavoured to supply its want—its soul-felt want, by a visit to her boudoir.
There is a certain tone of feeling when fancy is in its acme, when sentiment holds the senses in subordination, and the visionary joys which float in the imagination shed a livelier bliss on the soul, than the best pleasures cold reality ever conferred. ”

“ My life passes away here in a species of delectability to which I can give no name; and while, through the veil of delicate reserve which the pure suggestions of the purest nature have flung over the manners of my sweet Glorvina, a thousand little tendernesses unconsciously appear. Her amiable preceptor clings to me with a parent’s fondness; and her father’s increasing partiality for his hereditary enemy, is visible in a thousand instances; while neither of these excellent, but inexperienced men, suspect the secret intelligence which exists between the younger tutor and his lovely pupil. ”

“ She was created for a musician—there she is borne away by the magic of the art in which she excels, and the natural enthusiasm of her impassioned character: she can sigh, she can weep, she can smile over her harp. The sensibility of her soul trembles in her song, and the expression of her rapt countenance harmonizes with her voice. But at her drawing-desk, her features lose their animated character—the smile of rapture ceases to play, and the glance of inspiration to beam. ”

“ Thus it should seem, that when the bosom of national freedom was rent asunder, the national virtues which derived their nutriment from its source sunk into the abyss; while on the barren surface which covers the wreck of Irish greatness, the hand of prejudice and illiberality has sown the seeds of calumny and defamation, to choke up those healthful plants, indigenous to the soil, which still raise their oft-crushed heads, struggling for existence, and which, like the palm-tree, rise, in proportion to those efforts made to suppress them. ”

“ But in the soul-stealing strains of ‘the Voice of Cona,’ as breathed through the refined medium of Macpherson’s genius, no incongruity of style, character, or manner disturbs the profound interest they awaken. For my own part, when my heart is coldly void, when my spirits are sunk and drooping, I fly to my English Ossian, and then my sufferings are soothed, and every desponding spirit softens into a sweet melancholy, more delicious than joy itself ”

“ Dublin.
I am writing to you from the back-room of a noisy hotel in the centre of a great and bustling city: my only prospect the gloomy walls of the surrounding houses. What a contrast! Where now are those refreshing scenes on which my rapt gaze so lately dwelt—those wild sublimities of nature—the stupendous mountain, the Alpine cliff, the boundless ocean, and the smiling vale Where are those original and simple characters, those habits, those manners, to me at least so striking and so new?— All vanished like a dream!—
“The baseless fabric of a vision!” ”

“ The piper had now struck up one of those lilts, whose mirth-inspiring influence it is almost impossible to resist.* The Irish jig, above every other dance, leaves most to the genius of the dancer; and Glorvina, above all the women I have ever seen, seems most formed by nature to exce in the art. Her little form, pliant as that of an Egyptian alma, floats before the eye in all the swimming langour of the most graceful motion, or all the gay exility of soul-inspired animation. ”

“ For my part, since I have Glorvina, I shall never again endure that perpetuity of air, look, and address, which those who mistake formality for good-breeding are apt to assume. Manners, like the graduated scale of the thermometer, should betray, by degrees, the expansion or contraction of the feeling, as they are warmed by emotion or chilled by indifference. They should breathe the soul in order to win it. ”

“ When we meet, her glance sinks beneath the ardour of mine in soft confusion; her manner is no longer childishly playful, or carelessly indifferent, and sometimes a sigh, scarce breathed, is discovered by the blush which glows on her cheek for the inadvertency of her lip. Does she, then, begin to feel she has a heart? Does “Le besoin de l’ame tendre,” already throb with vague emotion in her bosom? Her abstracted air, her delicious melancholy, her unusual softness, betray the nature of the feelings by which she is overwhelmed—they are new to herself ”

“ I repeated, and pressing her hand to my heart, inarticulately added, “Oh! Glorvina, did the pulses which now throb against each other, throb in unison, you would understand, that even love is a cold, inadequate term for the sentiments you have inspired in a soul, which would claim a closer kindred to yours than even parental affinity can assert; if (though but by a glance) yours would deign to acknowledge the sacred union.”
We were standing in a remote part of the cemetery, under the shade of a drooping cypress—we were alone—we were unobserved. ”

“ I flew to this sad receptacle of suffering virtue, and effected the liberation of the Prince. There was a time when the haughty spirit of this proud chieftain would have revolted against the idea of owing a pecuniary obligation to any man: but those only who have laboured under a long and continued series of mental and bodily affliction, can tell how the mind’s strength is to be subdued, the energies of pride softened, and the delicacy of refined feelings blunted, by the pressure of reiterated suffering, of harassing and incessant disappointment. ”

“ May not the similarity of a refined organization exist between souls, and produce that mutual intelligence which sets the necessity of cold, verbal expression at defiance? May not the sympathy of a kindred sensibility in the bosom of another, meet and enjoy those delicious feelings by which yours is warmed, and, sinking beneath the inadequacy of language to give them birth, feel like you, in silent and sacred emotion? ”

“ Is it possible, that among these dear ruins, where all the “life of life” has been restored to me, the worst of human pangs should assail my full all-confiding heart. And yet I am jealous only on surmise: but who was ever jealous on conviction; for where is the heart so weak, so mean as to cherish the passion when betrayed by the object? I have already mentioned to you the incongruities which so forcibly struck me in Glorvina’s boudoir. ”

“ I approached—removed the barrier: the boy and the animal escaped together, and I found myself alone in the centre of this miserable asylum of human wretchedness—the residence of an Irish peasant. To those who have only contemplated this useful order of society in England, “where every rood of ground maintains its man,” and where the peasant liberally enjoys the comforts as well as the necessaries of life, the wretched picture which the interior of an Irish cabin presents, would be at once an object of compassion and disgust. ”

“ Sweet being! whatever may be the sentiments which the departure of the supposed unfortunate wanderer awakens in thy bosom, may that bosom still continue the hallowed asylum of the dove of peace! May the pure heart it enshrines still throb to the best impulses of the happiest nature, and beat with the soft palpitation of innocent pleasure and guileless transport, veiled from the rude intercourse of that world to which thy elevated and sublime nature is so eminently superior; long amidst the shade of the venerable ruins of thy forefathers mayest thou bloom and flourish in undisturbed felicity! ”

“ They say she is beautiful—it may be so;—but the blind man cannot be persuaded of the charms of the rose, when his finger is wounded by its thorns. She met me with some confusion, which was natural, considering she had been “won unsought.” Yet I thought it was the bashfulness of a hoyden, rather than that soul-born delicate bashfulness which I have seen accompanied with every grace. How few there are who do or can distinguish this in woman; yet in nature there is nothing more distinct than the modesty of sentiment and of constitution. ”