beautiful festivals, amid a band of charming companions in glittering white dress, intensely listening to the rival songs of the inspired minstrels, and with blushes placing the fragrant garland around the locks of the happy one, who had won the prize, you would have taken her for the beautiful and embodied spirit of this art, conspiring with its magic language; and you would cease to wonder at the ecstasies and melodies of the poets. Yet a mysterious fate seemed to be at work in the midst of this earthly paradise; The sole concern of the people of that country was about the marriage of the blooming princess, upon which the continuation of their blissful times, and the fate of the whole land, depended. The king was growing old. This care lay heavy at his heart; and yet no opening for marriage showed itself, that was agreeable to the wishes of all. A holy reverence for the royal family forbade any subject to harbor the idea of proposing for the hand of the princess. She was hardly regarded as a creature of this earth, and all the princes, who had appeared at court with proposals, seemed so inferior to her, that no one thought that the princess or the king could fix their eye on any one of them. A sense of inferiority had by degrees deterred any suitors from visiting the court, and the wide-spread report of the excessive pride of the royal family seemed to take away from all others the desire to see themselves equally humbled. Nor was this report entirely without foundation. The king, with all his mildness of disposition, had almost unconsciously imbibed a feeling of lofty superiority, which rendered every thought of a connexion of his daughter with a man of lower rank and obscurer origin unendurable and impossible to be entertained. Her high and unparalleled worth had heightened this feeling within him. He was descended from a very old royal family of the East. His consort had been the last of the descendants of the renowned hero Rustan. His minstrels continually sang to him of his relationship to those superhuman beings, who formerly ruled the world. In the magic mirror of their art the difference between the origin of his family and that of other men, and the splendor of his descent, appeared yet clearer, so that it seemed to him that he was connected with the rest of the human family through the nobler class of the poets alone. He looked around in vain for a second Rustan, whilst he felt that the heart of his blooming daughter, the situation of his kingdom, and his increasing age rendered her marriage, in all points of view, most desirable. Not far from the capital, there lived, upon a retired country-seat, an old man, who occupied himself exclusively with the education of his only son, except that he occasionally assisted the country people by his advice in cases of dangerous sickness. The young man was of a serious disposition, and devoted himself exclusively to the study of nature, in which his father had instructed him from childhood.