As this quotation was meant _all_ for Glorvina, I looked earnestly at her as I repeated it. A crimson torrent rushed to her cheek, and convinced me that she felt the full force of a sentiment so applicable to us both. “And why,” said I, addressing her in a low voice, “was Rosseau excluded from the sacred coalition with Ossian, Collins, your twilight harp, and winter rose?” Glorvina made no reply; but turned full on me her “eyes of dewy light.” Mine almost sunk beneath the melting ardour of their soul-beaming o o glance. Oh! child of Nature! child of genius and of passion! why was I withheld from throwing myself at thy feet; from offering thee the homage of that soul thou hast awakened; from covering thy hands with my kisses, and bathing them with tears of such delicious emotion, as thou only hast power to inspire? While we thus “_buvames a longs traits le philtre de l’amour,_” Father John gradually restored us to commonplace existence, by a commonplace conversation on the fineness of the weather, promising aspect of the season, &c., until the moon, as it rose sublimely above the summit of the mountain, called forth the melting tones of my Glorvina’s syren voice. Casting up her eyes to that Heaven whence they seem to have caught their emanation, she said, “I do not wonder that unenlightened nations should worship the moon. Our ideas are so intimately connected with our senses, so ductilely transferable from cause to effect, that the abstract thought may readily subside in the sensible image which awakens it. When, in the awful stillness of a calm night, I fix my eyes on the mild and beautiful orb, the _created_ has become the awakening medium of that adoration I offered to the _Creator_.” “Yes,” said the priest, “I remember that even in your childhood, you used to fix your eyes on the moon, and gaze and wonder. I believe it would have been no difficult matter to have plunged you back into the heathenism of your ancestors, and to have made it one of the gods of your idolatry.” “And was the chaste Luna in the _album sanctorum_ of your Druidical mythology?” said I. “Undoubtedly,” said the priest, “we read in the life of our celebrated saint, St. Columba, that on the altar-piece of a Druidical temple, the sun, moon, and stars were curiously depicted; and the form of the ancient Irish oath of allegiance, was to swear by the sun, moon, and stars, and other deities, celestial as well as terrestrial.” “How,” said I, “did your mythology touch so closely on that of the Greeks? Had you also your Pans and your Daphnes, as well as your Dians and Apollos?”