Sometimes Hagar would arouse herself, and throwing off at least all manifestation of gloom or sullenness, would make an effort to regain her fast ebbing power of pleasing; she also cultivated her rare talent for music; but she could seldom succeed in giving Raymond pleasure. He loved melody, and her forte was grand harmony. The grand anthems of Haydn, Handel, and Beethoven, lost none of their grandeur in her apprehension and expression. But her soul was strung upon too high a key, to give out sweetly the low breathing music of the melodies he loved. Thus he luxuriated in the bright, soft shower of Rosalia, full of melody, and writhed when the sublime storm of Hagar’s grand harmony flashed and thundered around him. Hagar saw this with anguish, oh! and this very anguish gave inspiration, gave additional force and expression to her passionate, to her gorgeous, to her awful conceptions of music! At last, however, she gave up the hope of ever inspiring him with admiration of her fierce tempests of harmony, and tried her voice and her touch upon the airs he loved, but here she failed—failed entirely. This was not her proper forte, and she had, as yet, too little control over her voice to manage it mechanically—to reduce it to the minor keys—she depended for much of her grand performance upon inspiration, and she had no inspiration for those low breathing melodies. Even suffering did not give it her; for in her hours of anguish her soul found its only expression in the sharp cry, the deep roar, the thunder of the grand harmony,—not in the sob and wail of melody. So Hagar abandoned the seemingly vain attempt to make her music agreeable in the drawing. She cultivated the art—_her_ art now by vocation and adoption—with all the passionate enthusiasm of her ardent nature; it became her solace, her soul’s expression. Her days were divided between her music and her children. At length, not being able to find sufficient expression, her soul began to struggle for freer, fuller utterance—for the revelation of its _own_ individual life and love, poetry and music—and Hagar became a poet and a musician by these steps; first she set the finest passages of her best loved poets to the sublimest strains of her most admired composers wherever they could be adapted; where they could not, she essayed to set the poetry to music of her own composition, as in the instance of Smart’s song; and then to compose words to her favorite strains of harmony. At last she attained the power of revealing her _own_ poetry—breathing her _own_ music. She was but nineteen. Her music and her poetry were all impromptus of sudden, irresistible inspiration—the expression of her life at the moment—the electric flash of soul, bright and gone in an instant—they were unwritten, inspired, expressed, and forgotten. They would come, these spasms of inspiration, as the blast comes, and go as it subsides; come as the tide comes, and go as it ebbs; come, waking the stillness of her soul as the thunder