"Oh, Love, thou art a strange wild thing, A dancing beam of Mayday sun, A life-morn song that angels sing, A gift from Him, the Highest One! Thou art a _claude-tint_ thrown among The Rembrandt shades that limn our strife! The olive on thy lip is hung, Thou dove, that bringest words of life." "_Love_," BY PERCY. COUNT CARLO ZANOTTI was a son of one of the noblest families in Venice--the heir of its titles, its wealth, its hereditary renown, and his prospects in the spring of life were golden as the trees in autumn. An incident in his father's history, which tinged the old man's declining years with a gloomy shadow, had also its effect upon the son, and, unmindful of the brilliant future, he brooded in sadness on the past. His mother, who was the beauty of her day, had yielded to the fascinations of a young and handsome Englishman, and in an unguarded moment left her home and her husband, to throw herself upon the poor protection of a profligate, and to meet the cold sneers and savage slights of a selfish and unforgiving world. _How much_ the character, in its gradual development, is biased by a mother's influence, it is difficult to estimate; but we all know that "_the thought which mirrors Eden in the face of home_" has saved even the _best_ of us from many an error and many a sin, and generated, even in the _worst_, some softening emotions, and caused some kindly acts. This holy influence, linked with a mother's memory, makes each thought of her, as the German beautifully expresses it, "a prayer to God," and we rise from musing upon her gentle love--kinder, better, wiser. "_The wild sea of our hearts lies mute, and o'er the waves the Saviour walks._" How terrible then to have that sanctuary defiled, to be taught that purity has fled, even from Dian's temple--_to be brought up an atheist in the religion of the heart_! Calm, gentle, passionless in outward aspect, the count became noted as an earnest scholar, and yet his heart contained many a hidden stratum of volcanic passion, which burned scathingly at the thought of his mother's shame! From an intense consciousness that the conduct of his parent entailed its measure of reproach upon himself, he shrank from the society of men, and sought sources of relaxation in tracing to their sequences those great thoughts which the thinkers of all time, in their debasement and their exaltation, have written down and immortalized--some, on the undying page; some, on the living canvas; some, on the ever-moving firmament of ceaseless action! The shadow of the wing of time fell upon _him_ as a man, at an age when most of us are immature, unthinking boys. _The epochs of strong natures_ are dialed upon the mind not by the sunshine but by the darkness of the heart! Our sorrows are the evil genii who transform in a moment boyhood to manhood, and manhood to age!