Facts may seem trite, which nevertheless must be said in explanation of the character he depicts by any one who writes the history of another. We lose the key of a cabinet, nearly new, perhaps, and we send to a vender of old iron to see if we cannot find one to fit it. We select one and then another for trial, and find at length a key which seems to conform to the shape of the keyhole. Would any one object to its trial because it is old and rust-worn? Well, it is old; it may have served in a hundred locks before, for aught we know; but it fits, and opens, and shuts this lock, and that is all we have to do with it. It has often been said, and was frequently insisted upon by Goethe, that each human being is a different being at each period of his age from that which he was at an anterior period. The very substance of the body, say the physiologists, is entirely changed in every seven years. What of the mind? Do cares, and sorrows, and experience, and joys, and hopes, and fruitions, effect no change in it? God forbid! If we believe the mind immortal, and not subject, like the body, to death and resurrection, still greater must be the changes; for its state must be progressive towards evil or towards good. Expansion certainly comes with knowledge; every day has its lesson, its reproof, its encouragement; and the very development or decay of the mortal frame affects the tenant within--hardens, strengthens, elevates, instructs; or, entenders, enfeebles, depresses, depraves. Suffice it here to say, that perhaps no one ever in life experienced greater changes of thought, feeling, character, than Leonora d'Orco, as the winged moments flew over her head. And yet the indestructible essence was the same; every essential element remained; it was but the combinations that were modified. A few years later, had you asked her if she had ever felt such sensations, or thought such thoughts as she felt and thought now, she would instantly have said "No;" but one moment's lifting of the veil which hides the pictures of the past would have shown her that she had felt, had thought such things; one moment's scrutiny of her own heart would have shown her that, in another form, she felt them, thought them still.