The evening was late, when, at the usual hour, Eloise and Fitzeustace took the way to their beloved pavilion. Fitzeustace was unusually desponding, and his ideas for futurity were marked by the melancholy of his mind. Eloise in vain attempted to soothe him; the contention of his mind was but too visible. She led him to the pavilion. They entered it. The autumnal moon had risen; her dimly-gleaming orb, scarcely now visible, was shrouded in the darkness of the atmosphere: like the spirit of the spotless ether, which shrinks from the obtrusive gaze of man, she hung behind a leaden-coloured cloud. The wind in low and melancholy whispering sighed among the branches of the towering trees; the melody of the nightingale, which floated upon its dying cadences, alone broke on the solemnity of the scene. Lives there, whose soul experiences no degree of delight, is susceptible of no gradations of feelings, at change of scenery? Lives there, who can listen to the cadence of the evening zephyr, and not acknowledge, in his mind, the sensations of celestial melancholy which it awakens? for, if he does, his life were valueless, his death were undeplored. Ambition, avarice, ten thousand mean, ignoble passions, had extinguished within him that soft, but indefinable sensorium of unallayed delight, with which his soul, whose susceptibility is not destroyed by the demands of selfish appetite, thrills exultingly, and wants but the union of another, of whom the feelings are in unison with his own, to constitute almost insupportable delight. Let Epicureans argue, and say, “There is no pleasure but in the gratification of the senses.” Let them enjoy their own opinion; I want not _pleasure_, when I can enjoy _happiness_. Let Stoics say, “Every idea that there are fine feelings, is weak; he who yields to them is even weaker.” Let those too, wise in their own conceit, indulge themselves in sordid and degrading hypotheses; let them suppose human nature capable of no influence from any thing but materiality; so long as I enjoy the innocent and _congenial_ delight, which it were needless to define to those who are strangers to it, I am satisfied. “Dear Fitzeustace,” said Eloise, “tell me what afflicts you; why are you so melancholy?--Do not we mutually love, and have we not the unrestrained enjoyment of each other’s society?” Fitzeustace sighed deeply; he pressed Eloise’s hand. “Why does my dearest Eloise suppose that I am unhappy?” The tone of his voice was tremulous, and a deadly settled paleness dwelt on his cheek. “Are you not unhappy, then, Fitzeustace?”