Mrs. Edwin James

“ Swift as a shadow, brief as any dream.’ “Such our sad destiny!”
Evelyn paused, and, coming close to me, seated herself; and taking my hand, she said, as her eyes slowly filled with tears: “Poor Balzano! would that he had loved you, Mary. You have more heart to bestow than I have. Mine has depths, few—none may ever sound. And now, tell me, candidly, ought I to marry him?”
She looked anxiously into my face. I scarcely knew what to reply. The strength of her—what shall I say?—imagination surprised me; or rather, are not the mind’s ideal shapes more real than that which we term reality? ”

“ Granted, dear Mentor—and what then?”
“What then? What a question!—when you are on the eve of marriage with one who possesses almost every quality you can desire. I say almost, for perfection is not to be found here below.”
Evelyn was silent for a few moments; then rising, she said, as one inspired, her cheek glowing, her eyes flashing, while her voice trembled with an emotion to which she rarely gave way—
“Hear me, Mary. Do not think me insensible. The passion so frequently misnamed love on earth is but its counterfeit. ”

“ Alas! in bitter suffering, and with tears of blood, do they expiate their supreme folly!—they then, when too late, perceive how they have flung away the purest gold for mere tinsel, and now they must starve for the want of that bread of life which can alone satisfy the famished heart, and which that once despised gold would have purchased.
The plain woman is wiser. She does not trample on the heart that loves her; and thus her lot is frequently a brighter one than that of her fairer, though less fortunate sister, doomed to mourn in silence and loneliness the neglected happiness of the past. ”

“ If ever my sweet sister should find one who loves her as I do—but who, unlike poor Melville, approaches near to the standard of perfection she has erected in her own imagination—then, dearest, do not hesitate to become his wife. My prayers shall ever be offered up for your happiness; and you, my ever-beloved Evelyn, will not, even in the midst of that bliss, refuse—if I fall—to drop a tear for one who would die to save you even one moment’s uneasiness. ”

“ Evelyn and myself, with Ella, who was now growing up, used occasionally to spend our evenings in the salon of Rossini, to whom we had been presented in Florence, and who was now settled in a magnificent apartment in the Chausseé d’Antin. Here we met, from time to time, all the celebrities of the artistic world, whether of music, painting or the dance; also the leading journalists and musical critics of the day, with an occasional sprinkling of the beau monde.
Rossini, at first sight, does not impose upon the mind as the greatest musical genius of his age, and one of the first of any era. ”

“ ELLA Evelyn had saved Philip D’Arcy’s life, but almost at the cost of her own. The reaction from intense despair to the excess of joy, was too much for her, and to a deathlike swoon succeeded the frantic ravings of delirium. The fever of her beloved had fastened its cruel fangs in her very vitals. During weeks and weeks of suffering, I scarcely left the bedside of my poor friend—for ever and for ever did she utter the name of Philip, her true mate, her celestial bridegroom, her first, last, her only love. ”

“ Oh! may the curse of a desolate heart and blighted affections recoil upon thee, may rest forsake thy pillow, and peace be forever a stranger to thy couch, that thy hard heart may be shivered at last, as into fragments, by blank despair—despair of pity here, of mercy hereafter! May God himself be deaf to the prayers wrung from thy bitter agony. No, go—I will not blaspheme: if thou bee’st a devil I cannot kill thee. Go, miserable man, and repent—if thou canst.”
D’Arcy still held the cowed and trembling wretch in his nervous grasp. Ella, pale, almost fainting, had quitted the room. ”

“ Have not all familiar objects lost their charm for us? How sensitively, too, have we shrunk from contact with the domestics—aye, even from the loved faces of the home circle! Alone would we entertain our sorrow. We are in love with her, and from her we will not be parted. This is the very luxury of grief. Joy may be a social passion; but surely the converse is true of profound misery.
Our unhappy heroine dared not thus indulge her sorrow—she must up and be doing. The poisoned arrow which had pierced her bosom must there remain, an agonized but concealed torture. ”

“ Evelyn, does this satisfy your heart? Ask yourself, are you not sometimes unhappy, even amid the most brilliant scenes? Do not imagine that every fop who approaches you, is capable of sincere attachment, even to a creature as fascinating as yourself. You are, to the majority of men, but as the pastime of an idle hour—or worse, the coquette whose smiles flatter their selfish vanity, and of whose favors they boast at the public promenades or the cafés. ”

“ Oh, Mary! when starting on my first journey as a wife, you placed in my hands a volume of Byron, your parting remembrance, you little thought what a fatal gift it would prove to me. It has opened a new field of romance, and from a child your poor Evelyn has sprung into womanhood. I now know the kind feeling I bear towards my husband is not worthy the name of love. ”

“ So spake the man of science, not aware of the whole truth, as we know it, and he spake as he thought. The sick man turned a grateful look on his young nurse, gently raising the hand she had placed in his to his pallid lips.
Many a time, as he daily grew stronger, would D’Arcy desire to ask after Evelyn; and yet, simple as was the question, it appeared as if his tongue refused to frame it. “Strange that she never inquires—never comes,” he mused. “Were not Ella so calm, I should say her mother, too, must be ill.” ”

“ We spend our lives in wild hopes of the future—in sad regrets for by-gone days. Folly—to the present with its pleasures and pains may we alone lay claim as our own. Do you remember, Mary, the fairy-like fête given by the Conte de Syracuse, in that exquisitely lovely mountain glade at Castellamare, so shadowy with graceful trees, through whose branches here and there, a bright glint of sunshine gilded the rocks, dancing over the feathery fern, and causing the rivulet to sparkle with a clearer crystal? ”

“ How I love to wander with the serious, philosophic Beethoven, through mazes of tangled modulations, at the same time clear and intricate, to revel in the delicious harmonized melodies of the divine Mozart, to drink in the weird and plaintive tones of the melancholy Weber, to muse, and sigh with the poet pianiste Chopin, criticising naught, analyzing naught, floating as it were, in an ocean of sweet sounds, lost in a reverie of ineffable bliss. ”

“ Beauty has ever, and justly, been styled “a fatal gift.” From the classic Helen to the lovely and unhappy Mary Stuart, and in more modern times the matchless and queenly Antoinette of France all these, and others of lesser 10note, have furnished us with abundant examples of the cruel destiny of those who possess this much coveted distinction. For my part, I can only be too thankful for having been endowed by nature with a face which the most indulgent of my friends could but term pleasing, and which a casual acquaintance might call plain. ”

“ How blissful a calm steals over the senses; what sweet peace pervades the soul attuned to the harmonies of nature. On such a night as this did Philip D’Arcy and Evelyn wander forth in the clear obscure, their feet sought the green paths where the cool moss grew beside the bubbling streamlet, and the night flowers wept beneath the silent stars, dreamily they sauntered side by side, their souls permeated with the placid tenderness of that soft hour. ”

“ In this lover’s walk, did we two friends pass many a long hour, weaving sweet fancies, as hope, that lovely but deceitful syren, lifted for us, with fairy wand, the curtain of futurity. Happy is it for us, that in youth, the far-off horizon ever appears to be bathed in sunshine! In the dawn of life we are like a rose, our illusions the leaves ”

“ D’Arcy brought her a bouquet of the most priceless hot-house flowers of the purest white—emblematic, he said, of her ethereal nature. How good of him to think of her. Though but a child, she doubtless reminds him of his Lilian. I have observed those limpid and unfathomable eyes of his fixed upon her more than once in silent contemplation. He is now a frequent visitor—perhaps too frequent. There are flowers so fair, fruits so tempting, that we forget the danger which lurks within. We inhale their perfume; we press to our lips their luscious juice, and we perish. ”

“ Evelyn treated him kindly—at times almost as an accepted lover, whilst at others she appeared to weary of his society, and to long for change and excitement. Highly fitted to shine in the salon, and passionately fond of amusement, our heroine had never, as yet, been able fully to gratify her taste for the world, which from the very novelty of its pleasures to her, now became her idol. An all-engrossing affection, it may be imagined, like that of Melville, rather nettled and annoyed her ”

“ Intellect sat enthroned on the regal brow, and the deep-set eyes—calm, 150blue, and unfathomable as the ocean—seemed the fitting mirror of “the human soul divine.” The lips firmly closed, pale, and somewhat severe in their habitual expression, could, nevertheless, occasionally wear a smile of rare beauty. The complexion, white as Parian marble, harmonized well with the crisply curling locks, and the full beard, of that cold, brown tint, which almost universally accompanies the refined style of male beauty. ”

“ The suite of rooms were now thrown open, and brilliantly lighted—all except Evelyn’s boudoir, which led into the conservatory, and in which reigned a subdued light, inviting to lovers or to those who prefer to muse in solitude and watch the crowd from afar. At present, all were congregated in the salon, around the fair hostess, who herself looked like a queen surrounded by her court. ”

“ I never thought my husband clever, I knew he did not care for music, nor understand poetry, but I did fancy him good-looking, and now, Mary, the worst is to come—I actually think him ugly—his long upper-lip, robbed of its greatest ornament, has such a sullen, almost sulky expression, when he is serious or asleep, that I actually shudder when I look at him. ”

“ It is fearful on what “trifles light as air,” hang the destiny of a life. A glance, a word misconstrued, may forever separate those who till then, were fast friends; forever banish them from out of our life. To those who have not the consoling hope of immortality in a brighter sphere, what a tangled, hopeless wilderness, must this world appear. And yet we live on; we dress, and smile, and mix with the crowd; we hide the never satisfied yearnings of our hearts beneath the rich tissues 137of lace and satin, and compress the sighs of the weary bosom with bands of diamonds and pearls. ”

“ Oh! that thought is torture. Why, what an ingenious self-tormentor am I. Why search the possible future to embitter the happy reality of the present. If the worst comes I can die—no, WE CANNOT DIE, we live; live forever with an eternal passion in the heart, when we make of a mere mortal the “god of our idolatry.”
April 15th.—This evening, it being my reception day, and a few intimates having collected in our salon, the conversation turned upon love and jealousy.
“I cannot,” observed D’Arcy, “understand the simultaneous existence of these two passions in one bosom.” ”

“ Fairy-like and unreal appeared that city to us, and yet so like my young imaginings, that I sometimes doubted whether I actually beheld fair Venice with my waking eyes. Those hearse-like gondolas, how silently do they thread the streets; only the ceaseless plash of the water is heard on the steps of the palaces—now, alas! crumbling into ruins. Looking 75on the Piazza di San Marco, I could not divest myself of the idea that I beheld a scene at the opera—there was the Basilico, the costumes, the moonlight—all that I had seen so frequently portrayed at Covent Garden, and her Majesty’s theatre. ”

“ Love, as I understand it, is a spiritual passion—a union of souls—that magnetic or electric affinity which is as irresistible as it is indissoluble; for it makes of two imperfect creatures one perfect being—it replaces the original self with another and dearer self; so that where once all thoughts and feelings culminated in the ego, they are now centered in Tu. This love knows neither change nor death—nor jealousy, strong as death; for it places implicit trust in the beloved one—and if, by chance, that trust is misplaced—ah! ”

“ Philip D’Arcy was one of those rarely endowed beings who, at first sight, impress you with a sense of power—you feel you are in the presence of one born to command. Where this moral force is combined with magnetic influence, or odic affinity, if you please so to term that irresistible attraction we all have felt, more or less at times, then the fascination of such a being is irresistible. He can draw you according to the degree of your sensitive nature, into his sphere, as into a vortex. ”

“ NAPLES AND THE NEAPOLITANS Much has been said and written by poets and philosophers on the evanescent nature of all earthly joys, and the precarious tenure on which we hold our happiness here below; but while this is indubitally true, let us be thankful that in the divine decrees of a wise Providence, sorrow is of a nature equally transient. The human heart shrinks from suffering and yearns to be blessed. ”

“ Her royal husband is beside her, in the prime of manly beauty. In a semi-circle, glittering with diamonds, and gold, and scarlet, stand the illustrious princes and princesses of the blood; and still farther in the background, appears a scarcely less dazzling group of court beauties and gallant cavaliers in attendance upon the royal party. The beauteous Duchess of Wellington, whose long dark lashes veil eyes whose lustre sorrow and disappointment have somewhat dimmed; the brilliant Lady Jocelyn, the queenly Duchess of Southerland, all are there in attendance on their beloved Sovereign. ”