But one day he rushed into my apartment with a look of that despair which only foreigners can assume, and which actually gave me the idea that he was about to commit suicide. Flinging himself into a chair, and plunging his hand deep into his bosom, from which I almost expected to see him draw the fatal weapon, he extracted a paper, and held it forth to me. "Read!" he exclaimed, with the most pathetic tones of Talma in tragedy—"read my ruin!" I read, and found that it was a letter from his domineering little Jewess, commanding him to throw up his commission on the spot, and especially not to go to France, on penalty of her eternal displeasure. My looks asked an explanation. "There!" cried the hero of the romance, "there!—see the caprice, the cruelty, the intolerable tyranny of that most uncertain, intractable, and imperious of all human beings!" I had neither consolation nor contradiction to offer.
He then let me into his own secret, with an occasional episode of the secrets of others—the substance of the whole being, that a counter revolution was preparing in France; that, after conducting the correspondence in London for some time, he had been ordered to carry a despatch, of the highest importance, to the secret agency in Paris; and that the question was now between love and honour—Mariamne having, by some unlucky hint dropped from her father, received intimation of the design, and putting her veto on his bearing any part in it in the most peremptory manner. What was to be done? The unfortunate youth was fairly on the horns of the dilemma, and he obviously saw no ray of extrication but the usual Parisian expedient of the pistol.
While he alternately raved and wept, the thought struck me—"Why might I not go in his place?" I was growing weary of the world, however little I knew of it. I had no Mariamne either to prohibit or to weep for me. The only being for whom I wished to live was lost to me already. I offered myself as the carrier of the despatch without delay.
I never saw ecstasy so visible in a human being; his eloquence exhausted the whole vocabulary of national rapture. "I was his friend, his brother, his preserver. I was the best, the ablest, the noblest of men." But when I attempted to escape from this overflow of gratitude, by observing on the very simple nature of the service, his recollection returned, and he generously endeavoured, with equal zeal, to dissuade me from an enterprise of which the perils were certainly neither few nor trifling. He was now in despair at my obstinacy. The emigration of the French princes had not merely weakened their cause in France, but had sharpened the malice of their enemies. Their agents had been arrested in all quarters, and any man who ventured to carry on a correspondence with them, was now alike in danger of assassination and of the law. After debating the matter long, without producing conviction on either side, it was at length agreed to refer the question to Mordecai, whom Lafontaine now formally acknowledged to be master of the secret on both sides of the Channel.
* * * * *
A VISION OF THE WORLD.
BY DELTA.
A blossom on a laurel tree—a cloudlet on the sky
Borne by the breeze—a panorama shifting on the eye;
A zig-zag lightning-flash amid the elemental strife—
Yea! each and all are emblems of man's transitory life!
Brightness dawns on us at our birth—the dear small world of home,
A tiny paradise from which our wishes never roam,
Till boyhood's widening circle brings its myriad hopes and fears,
The guileless faith that never doubts—the friendship that endears.
Each house and tree—each form and face, upon the ready mind
Their impress leave; and, in old age, that impress fresh we find,
Even though long intermediate years, by joy and sorrow sway'd,
Should there no mirror find, and in oblivion have decay'd.
How fearful first the shock of death! to think that even one
Whose step we knew, whose voice we heard, should see no more the sun;
That though a thousand years were ours, that form should never more
Revisit, with its welcome smiles, earth's once-deserted shore!
Look round the dwellings of the street—and tell, where now are they
Whose tongues made glad each separate hearth, in childhood's early day;
Now strangers, or another generation, there abide,
And the churchyard owns their lowly graves, green-mouldering side by side!
Spring! Summer! Autumn! Winter! then how vividly each came!
The moonlight pure, the starlight soft, and the noontide sheath'd in flame;
The dewy morning with her birds, and evening's gorgeous dyes,
As if the mantles of the blest were floating through the skies.