“The country around where my good preceptor resided was rural enough for a place so near the metropolis. A walk of somewhat less than a mile, through lanes that were themselves retired and lonely, led to green sequestered meadows, through which the humble Brent crept along its snake-like way. O God! how palpably, even in hours the least friendly to remembrance, there rises before my eyes, when I close them, that singular dwarfed tree which overshadowed the little stream, throwing its boughs half way to the opposite margin! I wonder if it still survives. I dare not revisit that spot. And there we were wont to meet (poor children that we were!) thinking not of the world we had scarce entered, dreaming not of fate and chance, reasoning not on what was to come, full only of our first born, our ineffable love. Along the quiet road between Ealing and Castlebar, the lodge gates stood (perhaps they are still standing,) which led to the grounds of a villa once occupied by the Duke of Kent. To the right of those gates, as you approached them from the common, was a path. Through two or three fields, as undisturbed and lonely as if they lay in the heart of some solitary land far from any human neighbourhood, this path conducted to the banks of the little rivulet, overshadowed here and there by blosoming shrubs and crooked pollards of fantastic shape. Along that path once sped the happiest steps that ever bore a boy’s heart to the object of its first innocent worship.” Lord Lytton does not disclose the name of his youthful and unhappy love. He was then 17 and she was, he informs us, one or two years older then he. This seems to be of course. Let the male reader ransack his own experience and it is odds there looms before his mental vision some angel of twenty whom he assured he should be sixteen in a few months, and that he felt old for his age. Lord Lytton had soon to part from the nymph, who, his Life by his son asserts, was forced into an early and uncongenial marriage. For three years, in obedience to duty, she strove to smother the love which consumed her; and when she sunk under the conflict, and death was about to release her from the obligations of marriage and life itself, she wrote a letter to her youthful adorer and with her dying hand informed him of the suffering which she had passed, and of her unconquerable devotion to him, and intimated a wish that he should visit her grave. It is she whom he apostrophizes in one of his earliest essays: “My lost, my buried, my unforgotten! you, whom I knew in the first fresh years of life, you, who were snatched from me before one leaf of the Summer of Youth and of love was withered; you over whose grave, yet a boy, I wept away half the softness of my soul, now that I know the eternal workings of the world, and the destiny of all human ties, I rejoice that you are no more! that custom never dulled the music of your voice, the pathos and the magic of your sweet eyes, that the halo of a dream was round