It had been a day of clouds and heavy rain, and now the night was closing over a dreary and scantily furnished apartment in one of those ruined palaces of Florence, which, like so many objects in Italy, are invested with the romantic prestige of grandeur passed away. A single rushlight threw into view the dilapidated marble walls, on which were the tattered remains of what might once have been gorgeous tapestry, and a large oriel window, in whose immediate vicinity stood a mean uncurtained bed, where lay a woman apparently dying. A single female, sitting near her to administer such assistance as she needed, and a cold, indifferent looking man, who had his chair drawn up in an opposite corner of the room, and evidently stationed there more from duty or necessity than any feeling of interest, were the sole occupants beside. Low murmuring sounds broke from the lips of the dying woman. She was talking incessantly, as in that thronging of indistinct, though perhaps not undelightful images that often flit across the brain of the departing, her thoughts seemed to be wandering over many varied scenes, and her consciousness of existence to be quickened as it was about to be closed forever. Her speech was of flowers and of sunshine, and of every thing fullest of life. Distant, happy years seemed to be restored to her, for her imagination transported her back to the era of her childhood, and she talked of wandering in old familiar places with her companions, many of them dead and gone—for by some subtle process of association, those of them mainly seemed present to her visions—and of “bounding,” as she said, “fast, fast” after something she could not detain. “Let me rest!” she would murmur, “I am breathless with running—let me rest!” The passionless placidity of the countenance was in strange contrast with this—and the helplessness of the limbs, which, cold and nearly motionless, began to assume the semblance of that clay to which they were fast returning. Suddenly she opened her eyes, restored to the full consciousness of her situation. The eyes—those mirrors of the soul which neither time nor sorrow can rob of their magic, as long as they are the reflection of that which is immortal—were all that told of Angelica Kauffmann—and the long chestnut hair, which, though now hard and icy to the touch, still clung round her temples with some of the old luxuriance of those days when she dreamed inspired visions by the Alpine streams, or shone, the star of genius, in metropolitan saloons. For the rest, her features were faded and pale, their classic outline vanished in the hollows of time and the sharpness of death—haggard, too, but bearing that pathetic expression which told it might be the result more of suffering than years. And that cold, almost repulsive looking man!—can he be the same who knelt beside her beneath the stars and talked of unperishing love? Yes, such is life! In those worldly reverses which are too often the doom of the mentally