One of them, apparently between fourteen and fifteen years of age, instead of following the example of her companions, had, in the excitement attending this operation, slipped away unperceived, and wandering listlessly along the windings of the river soon found herself out of hearing and sight. Proceeding on her way, and picking up a pebble or a flower just as it suited her, and stopping to observe every effective point of view in the landscape, with a narrowness of observation and sense of its beauty uncommon in one so young, she came to a ravine leading up from the side of the stream, which she ascended, till arriving on a high point that overlooked the channel of the river, she witnessed one of the most superb sunsets that ever gladdened an enthusiast’s eye. Amidst an array of purple clouds, fringed with silver, the sun was descending, gold colored, behind a peak of Mount Rosa, and suffusing the surrounding Alpine masses with a dim violet vapor. At her feet, and flowing in a direction opposite to the eye, was the river, now transformed into a stream of rich ruddy amber, with its sloping and picturesque banks and wooded islands, that diversified its brilliance with emerald shadows, taking its way in a hundred windings, whose succession she could trace, curve beyond curve, as it clove its course through the opening hills—far away, till, in the termination of the vista, gleamed the shining roofs of the Pania, with the white spire of its cathedral seeming to lose itself in the gold of the evening sky. To the left, immediately at the foot of the eminence where she stood, was the little white village, with its orchards and trim vineyards, and, beyond, those vast slopes on which the mountains lose themselves in the Italian plains. To the right, arose perpendicularly from the river a wall of sparkling granite rocks, now of the deepest vermilion in the alchemy of evening; and behind, towered grandly into the sky those white wildernesses of Julian Alps, receiving from their brethren, the Rhætians, the reflections of the opposite sunset in a thousand tints of lingering rose. A singular effect was produced on the girl by the contemplation of this scene. Her bosom heaved, her cheeks flushed, her eyes filled with tears. “Oh! for the voice of a poet,” said she, speaking to herself, “to celebrate these splendors in some immortal song! Or the hand of a painter, to retain them in undying hues, for a joy to the worshipers of beauty forever. Alas! they are fading—they shall soon be lost to the universe; and there is none here who, with the power of inhaling them into his spirit as I, hath the happier gift of reproducing them in some diviner form. Alas! I am weak, with no power but to _feel_; as when gazing on some noble statue—some magic scene—some surpassing human form—an irrepressible emotion seizes me, which, when I would invest with expression, my heart dies away in utter impotence!”