“What! jealous of all my marble figures, love? For shame!” replied her husband, playfully, twining his arm round her, and kissing her cheek; “but I will plead guilty to fatigue to-night, and you shall cure me by my favourite song.”
Annie flew to her harp, and De Vere, flinging himself on an easy chair, drank in the sounds with an intensity of delight which he never believed that song could have had the power to produce. “Yes!” he exclaimed, as her sweet voice ceased, “what are palaces and their pleasures compared to an hour like this? There is, indeed, ‘no place like home;’ what, oh! what would the artist and the student be without it?”
“Why, how is this, Signor Rinaldo? what extraordinary spell has been flung over you, so to change your opinion of a song that once you would not even hear?” laughingly exclaimed Lord St. Clair, springing from the balcony into the room. “Good evening, Mrs. De Vere; I have some inclination to arrest you for using unlawful witchcraft on this gentleman, even as I once thought of seizing him for allowing you to die of grief for his loss, when he was all the time in life!”
“Guilty, guilty; we both plead guilty,” replied Reginald, in the same tone; “but my guilt is of far deeper dye; my Annie’s witchery has but thrown such a halo over my home, that all which speaks of its charm is as sweet to my ear as to my heart. I am changed, St. Clair, and not merely in loving a song I once despised,” he added, with much feeling, “but in being enabled to trace a hand of love, where once I beheld but remorseless fate; and my wife has done this, so gently, so silently, that I guessed not her influence until I found myself joining her own lowly prayers, and believing in the same sustaining faith.”
“And has she explained its mystery?” inquired Lady Emily, with earnest interest.
“No, dear friend; nor do I need it now. The belief that a God of infinite love and compassion ordains all things, yet leaves us the perfect exercise of our free will, and in that freedom, and the acts thence ensuing, works out His divine decrees, constraining no man, yet bringing our most adverse wills to work out His heavenly rule—this is a belief that must be felt, it cannot be explained, and thrice-blessed are they on whom its unspeakable comfort is bestowed!”
The Spirit of Night.
FOUNDED ON A HEBREW APOLOGUE.
“Let there be light!” the Omnific Word had spoken, and light was. Over the newly-created world the pure element rushed from the spiritual courts of the High Empyrean, where it had reigned from everlasting. In its subtle essence, its ethereal exhalations, fit only for the atmosphere of those angelic spirits, who, at the word of the Highest, took their appointed stations in the new-formed world. Radiance too glorious, too resplendent for mortal view, filled the illimitable space, uniting earth with heaven as by a cloud of glory. Where had been Chaos, circled with shapeless darkness, now revolved, in its vast flood of irradiating lustre, the new work of the Eternal. Thousands of radiant spirits floated to and fro on the refulgent flood. The dazzling iris of their wings, the music of their movements, filling space with beauty and with sound; while up from the lowest Heaven to the High Empyrean—from the young seraph to the mighty spirits nighest the Invisible Throne, whose resplendent presence dazzled even the purified orbs of their angelic brethren—up, through every heaven and every rank, sounded the glad hallelujahs of love and praise.