Shakspeare.
“I feel that I am dying,” exclaimed the sick man, gazing wistfully toward the window, “and it seems good to me that it should be so. Lift me up a little that I may look upon this April morn, and throw back the curtains that I may feel the sweet breath of heaven once more upon my brow,—there, that will do, God bless you all.”
The speaker was in the last stage of his disease. His eye was sunken, his voice was feeble, his lips were bloodless, his emaciated fingers looked like talons, and his originally handsome countenance, now hollow, pale, and ghastly, seemed already as the face of a corpse. At times his features would twitch convulsively. He breathed quick and heavily.
The balmy air of a spring morning stealing soothingly across his forehead, and tossing his long dark locks wantonly about, appeared for a while to kindle up the fading energies of the dying man, and turning with a faint smile toward me, he said,
“I promised you my history, did I not? Well, I will tell it now, for I feel my sands are running low, and the cistern will soon be broken at the fountain. I have no time to lose; move nigher, for my voice is weak. Put that glass of wine close at your elbow,—I shall want my lips moistened, for my tale is long.
“Do you know what it is to be young? Ah! who does not? Youth is the heaven of our existence. Every thing then is full of poetry. It is the time for love, and song, and more than all for hope. This glorious morning is a type of our youth. The birds sing sweeter than ever; the winds have a music as of heaven; the distant tinkle of the streams is like a fountain-fall in moonlight, and the whole earth seems as if it were one cloudless Eden, where life would pass like a dream of sinless childhood. Poetry! did I say? oh! what is like our youth for that? But more than all, aye! more than music, or beauty, or even those childish dreams, is the poetry of a first pure love! I see by your countenance that you have known what that is. God help me! it has been at once the bliss and the bane of my existence.
“I left the University rich, accomplished, and not without academic fame. My parents were dead, and I had but few relations. Life was before me where to choose. I had every thing to make me happy, but—will you believe me?—I was not so. There was a void within me. I longed for something, and scarcely knew what. It was not for fame, for I had tasted of that, and turned sickened away; it was not for wealth, for I enjoyed enough of that to teach me, it would not satisfy my craving; it was neither fashion nor ease, nor the popularity of a public man; no, from all these I turned away athirst for higher and loftier things. What could it be? At length I learned. My life is dated from that moment.
“It was about a year after I had graduated, when, sick of the world and its emptiness, I left the city, in early summer for a stroll through the mountains of the interior. You have often seen the hills of the Susquehanna: well, I cannot stop to describe them. I was enraptured with their beauty, and determined to loiter among them until September, and so dismissing my servant, I took lodgings in a quiet country inn, and assumed the character of a mountain sportsman. But I delay my story. Hand me the wine and water.
“It was on a sporting excursion that I first saw my Isabel! Oh! if ever the ideal beauty of the ancients, or the dreams we have in childhood of angels’ faces, were realised in a human countenance, they were in that of Isabel. There was a sweetness about it I cannot describe; a purity in every line which breathed alone of heaven. Do you not believe that the face is the impress of the mind; that our prevailing thoughts gradually stamp themselves on our countenances, and that the sinless child and the haggard felon alike carry the mark of their characters written upon their brows? You do. Yes! God branded Cain as a murderer, but it was only the brand of his wild, terrible, agonising remorse.
“From the first moment of my seeing Isabel, I felt that I had met with that for which I had so long sought. The void in my bosom was satisfied. I had found something holier and brighter than I had deemed earth could give birth to, and I almost worshipped the ground where she trod. I loved her with all the poetry and fervor of a first love. She did not seem to me like others of her sex. There was a holiness cast around her like the mantle of a seraph, which awed the beholder into a reverential love. And oh! what bliss it was to gaze upon her face, to hear her lute-like voice, and to feel that I breathed the same air with herself.