“I left the University rich, accomplished, and not without academic fame. My parents were dead, and I had but few relations. Life was before me where to choose. I had every thing to make me happy, but—will you believe me?—I was not so. There was a void within me. I longed for something, and scarcely knew what. It was not for fame, for I had tasted of that, and turned sickened away; it was not for wealth, for I enjoyed enough of that to teach me, it would not satisfy my craving; it was neither fashion nor ease, nor the popularity of a public man; no, from all these I turned away athirst for higher and loftier things. What could it be? At length I learned. My life is dated from that moment. “It was about a year after I had graduated, when, sick of the world and its emptiness, I left the city, in early summer for a stroll through the mountains of the interior. You have often seen the hills of the Susquehanna: well, I cannot stop to describe them. I was enraptured with their beauty, and determined to loiter among them until September, and so dismissing my servant, I took lodgings in a quiet country inn, and assumed the character of a mountain sportsman. But I delay my story. Hand me the wine and water. “It was on a sporting excursion that I first saw my Isabel! Oh! if ever the ideal beauty of the ancients, or the dreams we have in childhood of angels’ faces, were realised in a human countenance, they were in that of Isabel. There was a sweetness about it I cannot describe; a purity in every line which breathed alone of heaven. Do you not believe that the face is the impress of the mind; that our prevailing thoughts gradually stamp themselves on our countenances, and that the sinless child and the haggard felon alike carry the mark of their characters written upon their brows? You do. Yes! God branded Cain as a murderer, but it was only the brand of his wild, terrible, agonising remorse. “From the first moment of my seeing Isabel, I felt that I had met with that for which I had so long sought. The void in my bosom was satisfied. I had found something holier and brighter than I had deemed earth could give birth to, and I almost worshipped the ground where she trod. I loved her with all the poetry and fervor of a first love. She did not seem to me like others of her sex. There was a holiness cast around her like the mantle of a seraph, which awed the beholder into a reverential love. And oh! what bliss it was to gaze upon her face, to hear her lute-like voice, and to feel that I breathed the same air with herself. “Isabel was the daughter of a village clergyman, who had been poor without being dependent. Her mother had been dead for many years; and her father had followed his wife but a few months before I first met Isabel. “How could I help loving such a being? Wealth to me was no object: I looked not for it in a bride. I sought for one in whom I might confide every thought, and in finding Isabel my happiness was complete.