The world it is empty, the heart will die, There's nothing to wish for beneath the sky: Thou Holy One, call Thy child away-- I've lived and loved; and that was to-day-- Make ready my grave-clothes to-morrow. Such was the early and melancholy close of a young life of the loveliest promise. The severe and sudden horror struck hard upon her fine mind, and drove it mournfully astray. Her heart was so broken that she could not live on. But Julius Alvinzi did not then or so perish: for seventeen weeks he lay upon a hospital bed in Mantua, helpless as an infant; and finally recovered so much of health as gave him again the common promise of life. He was afterwards sent to pass the long period of his convalescence at Venice; but the Julius Alvinzi, who rode forth from Salzburgh, was no longer to be recognised: crippled in his limbs--his fine countenance disfigured by deep and unsightly scars--his complexion pale--his hair turned grey with suffering. He had already stepped on twenty years in as many weeks, and he was already, to the eye, a worn and broken-down officer of veterans. He could not stir a pace without crutches; and his hip had been so shattered and distorted that it was painful to see him move. It was well that Beatrice was in her grave. No doubt she would have exhibited the noble constancy of a pure, angelic, and true love;--but she was spared that longer and heavier trial. Alvinzi, like a stricken deer, betook himself, with decayed hopes and an aching bosom, to a retired valley near Burgersdorf, about ten miles from Vienna. Here he took a small fishing cottage, near a lone and lovely stream, which flowed across a few velvet meadows, amid deep dells and still woods; and here he threw himself on the beautiful bosom of nature as on that of a mother. Here, for the first time, he was made acquainted, by a letter and a packet from the aged and desolate Adony, of the melancholy end of the lovely Beatrice. The packet contained a small cross which she had always worn, her miniature, and her psalter. The traveller who may now wander into the little valley, near Burgersdorf, where Alvinzi dwelt, will find the cypress, planted upon his grave the day after his funeral, only three years' growth; and if he go and sit under the tree, beneath which Alvinzi reposed his withered and broken frame for thirty summers, will perhaps agree with the narrator of this mournful story, that mercy was mingled in his bitter cup, and that Society is all but rude, To that delicious solitude. The peasants of that valley tell, with a superstitious awe, that Alvinzi was wont to discourse for hours together with departed spirits; and that they have stolen near his tree at sunset, and in the gloom of the evening, and by moonlight, and have distinctly heard him talking with some one whom he called "Beatrice." [The Embellishments of the _Souvenir_ are nearly on a par with those of previous years, with a light sprinkling of originality in the subjects.]