Every one has felt, and more than one poet besides Lord Byron has expressed the peculiar sensations which we experience when some bright and beautiful form crosses our path for a moment, and then leaves us without our seeing it any more. A shooting star, though but the meteor of a bright electric night, seems often more brilliant than the orbs that hold their place crowned with eternal splendour, and Charles Tyrrell thought that face the most beautiful, that form the most graceful, that he had ever beheld. There was, besides, a certain feeling of mystery about her rapid appearance and disappearance. It seemed to be a vision of loveliness given to him alone. It touched and woke imagination; and advancing to the door of the inn with very different thoughts from those which he had come from the supper-room, he gazed up towards the heavens, all sparkling with their everlasting fires, and fixing upon one bright planet which had not yet set, but remained pouring its calm light more tranquilly and equally than the rest, among all the radiant things that surrounded it, he thought that it was like her whom he had just seen, and, plunging into the dreams of fancy, he revelled in sweet reveries till it was time to depart. CHAPTER IV. The scenery amid which we are born and brought up, if we remain long enough therein to have passed that early period of existence on which memory seems to have no hold, sinks, as it were, into the spirit of man; twines itself intimately with every thought, and becomes a part of his being. He can never cast it off, any more than he can cast off the body in which his spirit acts. Almost every chain of his after thoughts is linked at some point to the magical circle which bounds his youth's ideas; and even when latent, and in no degree known, it is still present, affecting every feeling and every fancy, and giving a bent of its own to all our words and our deeds. I have heard a story of a girl who was captive to some Eastern prince, and wore upon her ancles a light golden ring. She learned to love her master devotedly, and was as happy as she could be in his love. Adored, adorned, and cherished, she sat beside him one day in all the pomp of Eastern state, when suddenly her eye fell upon the golden ring round her ancle, which custom had rendered so light that she had forgotten it altogether. The tears instantly rose in her eyes as she looked upon it, and her lover divining all at once, asked, with a look of reproach, "Would you be free?" She cast herself upon his bosom and answered, "Never!"