“This susceptibility to the influence of my country’s music, discovered itself in a period of existence when no associating sentiment of the heart could have called it into being; for I have often wept in convulsive emotion at an air, before the sad story it accompanied was understood: but now--now--that feeling is matured, and understanding awakened. Oh! you cannot judge--cannot feel--for you have no national music; and your country is the happiest under heaven!” Her voice faltered as she spoke--her fingers seemed impulsively to thrill on the chords of the harp--her eyes, her tear swollen, beautiful eyes, were thrown up to heaven, and her voice, “low and mournful as the song of the tomb,” sighed over the chords of her national lyre, as she faintly murmured Campbell’s beautiful poem to the ancient Irish air of _Erin go brack!_ Oh! is there on earth a being so cold, so icy, so insensible, as to have made a comment, even an _encomiastic_ one, when this song of the soul ceased to breathe! God knows how little I was inclined or empowered to make the faintest eulogium, or disturb the sacred silence which succeeded to her music’s dying murmur. On the contrary, I sat silent and motionless, with my head unconsciously leaning on my broken arm, and my handkerchief to my eyes: when at last I withdrew it, I found her hurried glance fixed on me with a smile of such expression! Oh! I could weep my heart’s most vital drop for such another glance--such another smile!--they seemed to say, but who dares to translate the language of the soul, which the eye only can express? In (I believe) equal emotion, we both arose at the same moment and walked to the window. Beyond the mass of ruins which spread in desolate confusion below, the ocean, calm and unruffled, expanded its awful bosom almost to infinitude; while a body of dark, sullen clouds, tinged with the partial beam of a meridian sun, floated above the summits of those savage cliffs which skirt this bold and rocky coast; and the tall spectral figure of Father John, leaning on a broken pediment, appeared like the embodied spirit of philosophy moralizing amidst the ruins of empires, on the instability of all human greatness. What a sublime assemblage of images. “How consonant,” thought I, gazing at Glorvina, “to the sublimated tone of our present feelings.” Glorvina waved her head in accidence to the idea, as though my lips had given it birth. How think you I felt, on this sweet involuntary acknowledgment of a mutual intelligence? Be that as it may, my eyes, too faithful I fear to my feelings, covered the face on which they were passionately riveted with blushes. At that moment Glorvina was summoned to dinner by a servant, for she only is permitted to dine with the Prince, as being of royal descent. The vision dissolved--she was again the proud Milesian Princess, and I the poor wandering _artist_--the eleemosynary guest of her hospitable mansion.