"I have tried all my powers of persuasion to prevail on this charming countess to visit our country. I have over and over again told her of you, and described her to you; that you are near her own age (for this lovely woman, though she has a son nearly twenty, is not more than forty;) that you are as fond of your ordinary boy as she is of her peerless one; that, in short, you and my father will receive her and Thaddeus, and the palatine, with open arms and hearts, if they will condescend to visit our humbler home at the end of the war. I believe I have repeated my entreaties, both to the countess and my friend, regularly every day since my arrival at Villanow, but always with the same issue: she smiles and refuses; and Thaddeus 'shakes his ambrosial curls' with a 'very god-like frown' of denial; I hope it is self-denial, in compliment to his mother's cruel and unprovoked negative. "Before I proceed, I must give you some idea of the real appearance of this palace. I recollect your having read a superficial account of it in a few slight sketches of Poland which have been published in England; but the pictures they exhibit are so faint, they hardly resemble the original. Pray do not laugh at me, if I begin in the usual descriptive style! You know there is only one way to describe houses and lands and rivers; so no blame can be thrown on me for taking the beaten path, where there is no other. To commence:-- "When we left Zielime, and advanced into the province of Masovia, the country around Praga rose at every step in fresh beauty. The numberless chains of gently swelling hills which encompass it on each side of the Vistula were in some parts checkered with corn fields, meadows, and green pastures covered with sheep, whose soft bleatings thrilled in my ears and transported my senses into new regions, so different was my charmed and tranquillized mind from the tossing anxieties attendant on the horrors I had recently witnessed. Surely there is nothing in the world, short of the most undivided reciprocal attachment, that has such power over the workings of the human heart as the mild sweetness of nature. The most ruffled temper, when emerging from the town, will subside into a calm at the sight of a wide stretch of landscape reposing in the twilight of a fine evening. It is then that the spirit of peace settles upon the heart, unfetters the thoughts and elevates the soul to the Creator. It is then that we behold the Parent of the universe in his works; we see his grandeur in earth, sea, and sky: we feel his affection in the emotions which they raise, and, half mortal, half etherealized, forget where we are, in the anticipation of what that world must be of which this earth is merely the shadow. [Footnote: This description of the banks of the Vistula was given to me with smiles and sighs. The reality was once enjoyed by the narrator, and there was a delight in the retrospection "sweet and mournful to the soul." At the time these reflections arose