Her voice faltered as she spoke—her fingers seemed impulsively to thrill on the chords of the harp—her eyes, her tear swollen, beautiful eyes, were thrown up to heaven, and her voice, “low and mournful as the song of the tomb,” sighed over the chords of her national lyre, as she faintly murmured Campbell’s beautiful poem to the ancient Irish air of Erin go brack!
Oh! is there on earth a being so cold, so icy, so insensible, as to have made a comment, even an encomiastic one, when this song of the soul ceased to breathe! God knows how little I was inclined or empowered to make the faintest eulogium, or disturb the sacred silence which succeeded to her music’s dying murmur. On the contrary, I sat silent and motionless, with my head unconsciously leaning on my broken arm, and my handkerchief to my eyes: when at last I withdrew it, I found her hurried glance fixed on me with a smile of such expression! Oh! I could weep my heart’s most vital drop for such another glance—such another smile!—they seemed to say, but who dares to translate the language of the soul, which the eye only can express?
In (I believe) equal emotion, we both arose at the same moment and walked to the window. Beyond the mass of ruins which spread in desolate confusion below, the ocean, calm and unruffled, expanded its awful bosom almost to infinitude; while a body of dark, sullen clouds, tinged with the partial beam of a meridian sun, floated above the summits of those savage cliffs which skirt this bold and rocky coast; and the tall spectral figure of Father John, leaning on a broken pediment, appeared like the embodied spirit of philosophy moralizing amidst the ruins of empires, on the instability of all human greatness.
What a sublime assemblage of images.
“How consonant,” thought I, gazing at Glorvina, “to the sublimated tone of our present feelings.” Glorvina waved her head in accidence to the idea, as though my lips had given it birth.
How think you I felt, on this sweet involuntary acknowledgment of a mutual intelligence?
Be that as it may, my eyes, too faithful I fear to my feelings, covered the face on which they were passionately riveted with blushes.
At that moment Glorvina was summoned to dinner by a servant, for she only is permitted to dine with the Prince, as being of royal descent. The vision dissolved—she was again the proud Milesian Princess, and I the poor wandering artist—the eleemosynary guest of her hospitable mansion.
The priest and I dined tete-a-tete; and, for the first time, he had all the conversation to himself; and got deep in Locke and Malbranche, in solving quidities, and starting hypothesis, to which I assented with great gravity, and thought only of Glorvina.
I again beheld her gracefully drooping over her harp—I again caught the melody of her song, and the sentiment it conveyed to the soul; and I entered fully into the idea of the Greek painter, who drew Love, not with a bow and arrow, but a lyre.