subsequent, and indeed on many subsequent occasions, the election must of sheer and bitter necessity occur,-the day of election had not yet arrived! Klünchünbrüch has, with a mind like a half-yearly aloe, invariably bloomed, expanded into action on the essential day, gone steadily through his duties, and sunk into an increased state of prostration the moment the day was over!

Poor poor Klünchünbruch!—thine has been a hard fate!-to be considered to have but two days of sanity in the year, and by those who assume to have three hundred and sixty-five such days, and have none!-to have a sense of duty in thee high enough to rise over wrecked fortune and happiness, and yet to enjoy but two days in the twelve months worthy of thy true and laboring spirit! Thou livest still-(for in the main incidents this sketch is founded on reality,)— and so long as thy accounts are not called from thee on earth, I verily believe there is a vitality in thy sense of this world's duty that will protract a call to thy more solemn and final audit. J. H. R.

THE TWO SISTERS.

No wonder that the great lyric poet should have given the epithet of "molesta" to "pituita," or that the Romans erected temples to the goddess Tussis. Both prove that the famed clime of Italy was not proof, even in ancient times, against the most deadly of maladies.

There is an importunate guest, who comes unbidden; first knocks gently at the door, then with more assurance, after a time will admit of no denial, and at last makes the house her home. Shall I draw

her portrait? It is not a prepossessing one. She is a "death in life," an age in youth; her face is "white as leprosy;" her and glassy; her breath, of fire; her step inaudible, yet sure.

eyes are lustrous

She delights in the keen blasts of the wintry wind, the bleak and unsheltered mountain, a wide extent of coast open to all the fury of the northeast, the autumnal woods with their fallen and decayed leaves, the stagnant and weed-overgrown pool, the putrid waste of tremulous marshes; these are some of her haunts!

Yet does she not disdain the resort of man. Go to the gas-lit theatre, linger in the draught of its corridors; enter the crowded and unventilated ball room; kneel in the vaulted aisle of some church, steaming putrefaction: she is there, in her multiplicity of form, and ubiquity of evil.

Yes! in all and each of these places she is to be found.

Oh! the vulture that she is. To use the words of the Greek dramatist, "The scent of human prey sends up a grateful odor to make glad her nostrils, as laughter does the heart;" and, like the bloodhounds of Orestes, she never loses sight of her prey till she has tracked it to earth.

She is no respecter of persons, has no predilection for dresses: sometimes she clothes herself in the robe of pride and sometimes

is seen in rags. She pretends to be the most affectionate of brides; tells her lover" Be happy!" winds him in her chilly arms, and, writhe as he may, he cannot escape from her hellish embraces.

You shall be acquainted presently with her name: may you only hear it! Be strangers to each other, but avoid her as you would a pestilence!

I will let you into the secret of those whom she loves best. Listen!

If there is a father who has an only son, the last scion of his stock, the staff of his declining years, his idol, the object of his worship, one on whom he gazes till he sheds tears of tenderest delight, a youth "the observed of all observers," who has ennobled his mind, cultivated his talents, and purified his affections,-it is on him she casts her longing eye, she breathes on him with her breath of flame. The artist at his easel, the student in his closet, the author in his garret, the manufacturer at his loom,-these are the objects of her fond regard. But for the bloated epicure, the half-starved miser, the griping usurer, the painted harridan-these, with a singular caprice, she passes by unobserved; whilst from youth and beauty-youth, ere it comes to its prime; not as it displays itself in the muscular vigor of limb, the roseate bloom on the unchanging cheek, or elastic vigor of the step; no! no!-like an unseasonable frost, she chooses to cut off the fairest flowers, and nip the tenderest shoots.

She is called Consumption. Yet comes she not alone. Disease, Desolation, and Despair, these are her familiars, she brings them with her in her imperial train: they thrust themselves into the chariot, they accompany her to the public gardens, they intrude on the secluded walk, they seat themselves at the table, drug the wine with gall, mix poison in the viands, haunt the couch of restlessness, and quit not their victims till the cup of bitterness is full,-till they have found a refuge from pain, sorrow, and regret, in that last resting-place of the wretched, the grave.

Such were my reflections as in March, many, many years ago, I was lounging leisurely in the "Invalid's Walk" at Torbay. It is the Nice or Pisa of England, and the great refuge of consump tive patients from all parts of the three kingdoms. This famed spot is protected from the north-easterly winds by range behind range of hills: here, carpeted with turf of eternal verdure; and there, surmounted by tors covered with plantations to their tops, or showing, denuded of the slightest vestige of vegetation, their bald scalps, of the most fantastic forms, and rich in color as those of the lakes of Cumberland or Killarney. So that Torbay is not only the most picturesque, but the most desirable residence on the coast of Devonshire. But if the environs are beautiful, what shall I say of the place itself, with its basin, like a small sea-port scooped out of the rock, artificially formed by means of two piers or moles, the miniature of those at Genoa; terrace above terrace, its buildings and villas of the most elegant construction, with their verandas and balconies commanding a view of Torbay, seen from between two rival wooded cones, where many a thatched cottage peeps, like a bird's nest out of the thick foliage of evergreens that embower them? I have called Torbay a winter residence; no! winter there is none: so mild is the climate, that the ilex, the arbutus, and the

philarea, here grow to a size that they never elsewhere attain. The myrtle is seen clambering over the windows; and the China rose has, throughout the year, a constant succession of buds and flowers.

The group that gave occasion to my sombre apostrophe consisted of a father and his two daughters, whom I had met for some time in my rambles, and with whom I afterwards became acquainted. Would I had not! for the latter were doomed within a few months, to be. come victims to an hereditary malady that had proved fatal to their mother.

The father, at least sixty years of age, in his gait and air bore the appearance of what he had been a soldier. He had served in the East Indies; and it might be perceived that, in common with other long residents in that country, he had not escaped the effects of its destructive climate, but that his constitution was much impaired. Some deep sorrow seemed imprinted on his fine and noble features, which had lately taken a still deeper shade, from a presentiment of evil,-a conviction that a premature fate menaced the lives of those dearer to him even than his own; that it hung suspended, like a sword by a single thread, over the heads of his daughters. They were drawn in chairs of a light and fragile form, which, as they sate, gave a peculiar elegance and grace to their attitude; being such as Canova, modelling from the antique, has chosen for one of his statues. The general was walking between them, and his eye turned occasionally from one to the other: neither spoke; his heart was too full to give utterance to his feelings; and to them, the effort would have been painful, even had they been permitted by their physician, to converse in the open air. They held at times their handkerchiefs-one was, I perceived, spotted with blood,-to their mouths, as though the atmosphere respired was too keen for their laccrated lungs. Now and then they interchanged glances, which seemed to be mutually understood; and I thought I could read in their countenances a sense of the loveliness of the scenery around them, a pleasure tinged with melancholy, whenever a ray of sunshine through some opening in the trees smiled on them. Then, too, they smiled; but it was a faint smile, like that of the March sun,—a mockery of joy.

Julia, the eldest, was a brunette her figure was above the common height; and her hair, which she wore in long depending ringlets on each side of her face, was, like her eyes, black as jet.

Caroline, the youngest, in no way resembled her sister; and the singular contrast between them, a foil to the beauty of each, gained them the appellation of the Celestial and Terrestrial Hemispheres. Caroline had just attained that critical period of life when the girl gives place to the woman; she was in her seventeenth year. Like the shoot of some parasite plant that is scarcely able to support itself, thin, tall, and delicate was her form. For some months she had been unequal to walking, even for a few yards, without fatigue; and her father always carried in his hand a camp-seat, on which, whenever she had crawled out on the jettee, or to the strand, at every twenty or thirty yards she was obliged to rest; whilst Julia leaned affectionately over her, and watched every turn of her sister's changing countenance, her own sweet and angelic as that of some divine messenger sent to comfort a dying martyr. No murmur or complaint ever escaped Caroline's lips; nothing could be more affecting

than to see the effort she made to disguise her sufferings, in order to quiet the apprehensions of those beings whose lives hung upon hers.

I have said she was beautiful: what words can describe her loveliness!-it was that of an embodied spirit. In a portrait, such a complexion would have seemed the flattery of the art; enamel could give a faint idea of its clearness, its brilliancy, its transparency. It was pure as herself, the reflex of her soul without a taint of earth. Her eyes were what the Spaniards call adormidellos; an epithet the most endearing and significant, and which, for want of a diminutive in our language, admits of no synonyme. To make it intelligible by a paraphrase, I should say they were eyes which, under the veil of their long silken lashes, express, not that the soul is asleep, but dreaming of love,-divine rather than human love, for who was worthy of inspiring it? But when she raised those dark blue orbs, they shone with the light of genius, the fire of intelligence; and yet there was, at times, in them an unnatural lustre, like that of a lamp that burns the brighter as it is about to lose its vivifying oil. In proportion as the malady became more inveterate, her spirits increased; and the pure emanation of her mind seemed to throw a halo about her, making her look like an angelwith all, save wings, for heaven.

I saw, with a regret as if she had been my own sister, Death approach with stealthy pace, and foresaw that she would at last sink into his arms, calmly and peaceably as a child is hushed to slumber on its nurse's breast. And yet every day did her cheek assume a livelier hectic and a common observer would have fancied he observed symptoms of convalescence; like the gala-day in the East, it was only a flattering revelation.

This contest between mind and matter, this strife between the powers of life and death, reminded me of a picture of Guido's,* representing a rosy infant lying on a winding-sheet, and playing with a skull; or rather, of two paintings in one of the collections at Bologna, the same that contains the Ecce Homo of Correggio; but I have forgotten the name of the gallery, nor is it important. The custode himself, though familiarity might have blunted his feelings, shrunk from it in disgust; for myself, it not only made a deep impression on me at the time, but has never recurred to me since without causing me to shudder. On one side of a double case is a large miniature in oil, representing a girl: she is in the very zenith of life, and youth, and health, and radiant with all the rich glow of southern beauty. She died, it appears, shortly after sitting for this portrait. Now for the reverse. The father, with a strange caprice, long after she was conveyed to the family vault, had her disinterred, and employed the same artist to draw her then likeness. The work of putrefaction has begun, the lips are purple, the eyes sunken, the worm is at its revels; and yet, horrible to say, there is sufficient similitude between the two faces to establish their identity. O poor mortality! must Caroline soon come to this? Yes, her hour was nigh!

She had an extraordinary talent for music; and composed, the even. ing before she died, an air that expressed, better than words could do, the peculiar state of her mind, her regret at being about to quit, so young, this beautiful world, which she had almost worshipped.

• In the cabinet of M. Schamps, at Ghent.

It was an apotheosis of nature! a farewell to the universe! It is probable that, feeling her end approach, she had gone down into the breakfast-room early in the morning to play this pathetic dirge; for she was found in a large arm-chair, her fingers extended, as though in the act of touching the piano. Those who discovered her thus, supposed she slept; for the pleasure of the music, and the thoughts that had inspired the air, yet lingered on her countenance, and lit it up with a faint smile. Half hoping, yet fearing to awaken her, they might, with Lear, have applied a mirror to her mouth to see whether her breath would dim its lustre. No! that slumber was her last; her spirit had fled to Him who gave it.

In losing her sister, Julia had lost all the objects of life. To whom could she now communicate her most secret thoughts; make them intelligible even without words, comprehended by a glance ? The books they used to read together, she could not open them without finding some passage one had marked to show the other. The instrument, she could not bear its tones; the duets they had played, the airs they had sung, all the inanimate things in the room, the vacant chair, the unfinished embroidery, her own sketch still lingering in the glass, where it was Caroline's habit to put whatever last had pleased her, so as to have it constantly before her eyes, recalled to her remorseless memory the recollection of her irreparable loss.

Even the face of nature seemed changed: those views on which she had gazed with rapture had lost all their charm. The little garden which Caroline had laid out; the flowers she had planted, and watered; the whispering among the leaves, the ripple of the waves on the sea-shore, the song of the birds, were all associated with her, and did but nourish her grief, and make her solitude more lonely.

Oh! let one who would seek to extinguish unavailing recollections fly from the scenes of former happiness! Two months elapsed, and the general and his surviving daughter had changed their abode for a villa at Tor. Time, that hea's all but compunctious visitings of conscience, had begun to pour its opiate on the soul of Julia. Sighs and tears are the safety-valves of nature; they are the balm of the wounded spirit, like the tenderness of a mother, or the sympathy of an affectionate friend. Her health, too, had begun to improve, and all the worst of her symptoms to disappear, when there arrived at Torbay one of those missionaries, those disciples of the new Whit field, who, under the mask of adherence to the rights of the established church, preach the desolating doctrines of election and grace-doctrines that overthrew the intellect, and poisoned the life, of one of the most amiable, beneficent, and virtuous of mankind, the infatuated Cowper. This missionary was a man of fifty, with a face in whose hard and strongly marked features were visible the traces of early passions, the violence of which might have driven him into the commission of any crime,-passions that had been smothered, not extinguished, by the cold and calculating dictates of worldly prudence. The inward consciousness of his own sinful nature made him conceive that all the imaginations of the heart are evil, that all hearts are full of concupiscence and the long catalogue of offences which the Apostle enumerates. Continual mortification and penance, and the exercise of prayer, had made him mistake habit