One evening, about the time of the miller's adventure in the Fairies' Chapel, Eleanor was looking through her casement listlessly, perhaps unconsciously. She sighed for occupation. The glorious hues of sunset were gone; the moon was rising, and she watched its course from the horizon of long dark hills up to the bare boughs of the sycamores by the banks of the little stream below. Again she sighed, and so heavily that it seemed to be re-echoed from the walls of her chamber. She almost expected the grim panels to start aside as she looked round, half-wishing, half-afraid that she might discover the intruder. Disappointed, she turned again to the casement, through which the moonbeams, now partially intercepted by the branches, lay in chequered light and darkness on the floor. "I thought thou wert here. Alas! I am unhappy, and I know not why." While she spoke a tear trembled on her dark eyelashes, and as the moonlight shone upon it, the reflection glanced back to the eye-ball, and a radiant form apparently glided through the chamber. But the spectre vanished as the eyelid passed over, and swept away the illusion. She leaned her glowing cheek upon a hand white and exquisitely formed as the purest statuary: an image of more perfect loveliness never glanced through a lady's lattice. She carelessly took up her cithern. A few wild chords flew from her touch. She bent her head towards the instrument, as if wooing its melody--the vibrations that crept to her heart. She hummed a low and plaintive descant, mournful and tender as her own thoughts. The tone and feeling of the ballad we attempt to preserve in the following shape:-- SONG. I. "It is the stream, Singing to the cold moon with babbling tongue; Yet, ah! not half so wildly as the song Of my heart's dream. Is not my love most beautiful, thou moon? Though pale as hope delayed; Methought, beneath his feet the wild-flowers played Like living hearts in tune. 2. "We stood alone: Then, as he drew the dark curls from my sight, Through his transparent hand and arm of light, The far skies shone. List! 'twas the dove. It seemed the echo of his own fond tone; Sweet as the hymn of seraphs round the throne Of hope and love!" But the moon was not the object of her love. Ladies are little apt to become enamoured of such a fit emblem of their own fickle and capricious humours; and yet, somebody she loved, but he was invisible! Probably her wild and fervid imagination had created a form--pictured it to the mind, and endowed it with her own notions of excellence and perfection: precisely the same as love in the ordinary mode, with this difference only--to wit, the object is a living and breathing substance, around which these haloes of the imagination are thrown; whereas, in the case of which we are speaking, the lady's ideal image was transferred to a being she had never seen.