I was at the theatre one night, when the friend who accompanied me directed my attention to a very lovely girl, who, with her mother and a party of friends, occupied the next box. She was, certainly, the loveliest creature my eyes had ever lighted upon; with a sylph-like form, (that is the usual phrase, I believe,) wanting perhaps that complete roundness of limb which is considered essential to perfect beauty in a woman--but she was barely sixteen--and yet suggesting, too, the idea of consummate symmetry. Her face--but who can describe beauty? who even can paint it? Let any man look at the finest attempts to achieve this impossibility by the old masters, and then let him compare them with the faces he has seen, and may see every day. Heavens! what inanities! Can a man paint a soul upon canvass? And yet the artist talks of his "expression." I watched her closely during the performance,--indeed, I had no power to withdraw my gaze from her; and once or twice her eyes met mine, and I thought I could perceive she was not altogether displeased at my attention. Her confusion betrayed that to me, and in one short hour I was a lost man. When the play was over, I framed a miserable excuse, which I thought at the time a most ingenious one, to my friend for not accompanying him home to supper, as I had promised; and hastening after my unknown and her mother, who had left the box, was just in time to see them enter a coach. I contrived to keep pace with it, and saw it deposit its beautiful freight at a house in a small private street near Portman Square. I could laugh--unaccustomed as I am even to private laughing now-a-days--when I think, as I do sometimes, on those days of sentiment. It were as futile to attempt to renew that sentiment after thirty, as to strive to recal those days, and to bid them stand in next year's calendar. The green wood is out of the tree by that time; and the trunk becomes hard, and gnarled, and stubborn. Now is the time to enjoy life. At five-and-thirty the blood and the brain act in concert, and the heart beats not one pulse the quicker, while they do their spiriting--not gently always.--To return.