Of life she had taken her farewell long, long ago; and death--the bugbear of the happy, the terror of the dastard--dark, mysterious, unknown death--had become to her an intimate, and, as it were, familiar friend. It was not that she had lessoned her shrinking spirit to endure with calmness that which it had shuddered to encounter; it was not that she had weaned her heart, yet clinging to the vanities of a heartless world, with difficulty and trembling, to their abandonment; least of all was it that she had been taught to regard that final separation with the stoic’s apathy, or to look for that dull and sunless rest, that absence of all feelings, whether of good or evil; that total annihilation of mind, in the great hereafter, which, to a sensitive temperament, and soul not rendered wholly callous by the debasing contact with this world’s idols, must seem a punishment secondary, if secondary, only to an eternity of wo. Born to a station lofty as the most vaulting ambition could desire, nurtured in gentleness and luxury, gifted with a mind such as rarely dwells within a mortal form, and having that mind invested in a frame, by its resplendent beauty fitted to be the door of immortality, she had felt, in a succession of sorrows almost unexampled, that the very qualities which should have ministered to her for bliss, had been converted into the instruments of misery and pain. Attached to her native land with the Switzer’s patriotism, she had endured from it the extremities of scorn and hatred. Full of the warmest sympathies even for the meanest of mankind, she had never loved a single being but he had recompensed that love with coals of fire heaped upon her head; or if a few had passed unscathed through the trying ordeal of benefits received, they had themselves miserably perished for their gratitude toward one whose love seemed fated to blight the virtues, or destroy the being of all on whom it was bestowed. If the sun of her morning had ridden gloriously forth in a serene heaven, with the promise of a splendid noontide and an unclouded setting, yet scarcely had it scaled one half of its meridian height, ere it had been compassed about with gloom and darkness; and ere its setting the thunders had rolled and the deadly lightnings flashed between the daygod and its scattered worshippers. She had been led step by step from the keenest enjoyment to the utmost disregard of the pleasures of the earth; she had drained the cup, and knew its bitterness too well to languish for a second draught. Yet there was nothing of resentment, nothing of hard-heartedness or scorn, in the feelings with which she looked back on the world and its adorers. She did not despise the many for that they still lingered in pursuit of a star which she had found, by sad experience, to be but a delusive meteor; much less did she hate the happy few to whom that valley, which had been to her indeed a vale of tears and of the shadow of death, had