The style of this poem reminded me of Montmorenci, and at the same moment I heard a rustling sound behind me. I started. ''Tis Montmorenci!' cried I.
Agitated in the extreme, I turned to see.—It was only a cock-sparrow.
'I deserve the disappointment,' said I to myself, 'for I have never once thought of that amiable youth since I last beheld him. 'Sweetest and noblest of men,' exclaimed I, aloud, 'say, dost thou mourn my mysterious absence? Perhaps the draught of air that I now inhale is the same which thou hast breathed forth, in a sigh for the far distant Cherubina!'
'That cannot well be,' interrupted Stuart, 'or at least the sigh of this unknown must have been packed up in a case, and hermetically sealed, to have come to you without being dispersed on the way.'
'There you happen to be mistaken,' answered I. 'For in the Hermit of the Rock, the heroine, while sitting on the coast of Sardinia, seemed to think it highly probable, that the billow at her feet might be the identical billow which had swallowed up her lover, about a year before, off the coast of Martinique.'
'That was not at all more improbable than Valancourt's theory,' said Stuart.
'What was it?' asked I.
'Why,' said he, 'that the sun sets, in different longitudes, at the same moment. For when his Emily was going to Italy, while he remained in France, he begged of her to watch the setting of the sun every evening, that both their eyes might be fixed upon the same object at once. Now, as the sun would set, where she was in Italy, much earlier than where he was in France, he certainly took the best of all possible methods to prevent their looking at it together.'
'But, Sir,' said Betterton, 'heroes and heroines are not bound to understand astronomy.'
'And yet,' answered Stuart, 'they are greater star-gazers than the ancient Egyptians. To form an attachment for the moon, and write a sonnet on it, is the principal test of being a heroine.'