graceful animation, made the deliberations of camps and senates trivial in comparison to Montalto's ear; and, on his retiring at night to his chamber, he began seriously to question himself whether it was allowable for a soldier and an envoy to commit the folly of falling in love.

"His sleep was invaded by dreams restless and strange, but without pain; and he rose at day-break with a frame refreshed, and a mind soothed by gentle recollections. The breath of morning came round him with living fragrance, and he gazed long upon a landscape, assuming at every instant some new shape of beauty. The sound of voices below awoke him; he saw Justiniani and Adriana passing down the valley, and followed them through an absolute wilderness of colour and perfume; plants of every climate and every brilliancy of hue covering the sides of the valley with a luxuriance that looked like the various and spontaneous richness of an evening sky.

"I can now give you your answer,' said Justiniani, smiling; last night, when you arrived, my best figures of speech were gone to rest; my old friends, the fields and the mountains, had lost their persuasion. But look round you now, Signor, and tell me what is there in coronets or helmets that ought to 11*

VOL. II.

overpower the pleading of what we now see round us.'

"These flowers, my father,' said Adria. na, in a suppressed voice, are no courtiers, -they will never betray you; and these mountains will be guards that will never desert their lord.'

"Justiniani pressed her hand. Then turning to Montalto, whose spirit was absorbed by all that he had seen and heard; 'Count,' said he, when the fickle Venetians shall be no more like their own sea, the smoothest and the most treacherous of all things, then let me trust them. You are young, bold, distinguished; while the republic has you, she can want neither counsellor nor soldier; and when you shall have no want of her, come here among us, and despise the emptiness of popular fame, in the presence of the solid and simple happiness of nature.'

"Montalto remonstrated; he described with the vigour of conviction the hazards of Venice, and the strong necessity of placing at the head of her affairs a man whose eminence would at once extinguish all rivalry among the nobles, and restore the confidence of the people.

"Adriana had, almost for the first time, looked upon the noble Venetian in the course He was no habitual

of this remonstrance.

orator, but his sincerity and the fervour of his feelings gave his words a natural elo, quence. As he talked of the campaign, the chivalric gallantry of the Venetian troops, circumvented and wasted away by the perfidy of their general, and their last desperate stand as they rallied round the banner of the winged lion on the shore of Fusina, and looking to their own glorious city fought with the untameable valour of heroes resolved not to return with shame; his voice involuntarily swelled, his fine form dilated with sudden energy, and his bronzed cheek grew crimson with the glow of patriotism and soldiership. Justiniani gazed on him with the generous admiration of one lofty mind for another, and saw before him a long career of renown. Adriana gazed too, but it was with a sentiment strangely mixed of delight and pain. She had never before seen a being that so much realized the pictures of her solitary hours, when she sat revolving the illustrious days of antiquity. She could have thought that she was looking upon another Alcibiades, with all his beauty, but without his weakness, made to command armies, and wield senates, and lead the hearts of women in his chain of gold and flowers. But when she heard him talk of the perils of the troops, and the crisis at hand, her admiration was forgotten in the sudden thought, how soon

some trivial chance of war might make that perfect and splendid being but as dust and ashes. She turned away with a pang heart, and could listen no more.

of

CHAPTER XVI.

Oh Love, what art thou? April smiles and tears;
Dreams, waking follies, idler hopes, and fears;
Joys, bitter sorrows; of what art thou made?
Canst thou be substance, where all else is shade?

"MONTALTO prepared to return to Venice; but'a new and unaccountable heaviness pressed upon him. In his chamber, during the preparations for his homeward journey, thoughts came over him of the vanity and transient nature of human ambition, of the melancholy glories of war, and of the precariousness of public honours. All around him. was in favour of the argument. His noble entertainer enjoyed a happiness not to be found under the proudest roof in Venice. Montalto looked out upon the landscape, and it lay before him in a dewy and tranquil loveliness that he thought he had not per ceived before. He must go through his task,

stern as it was; but he made in that hour a secret vow of finding out some nook of the earth that resembled this, if such enchantment was to be found besides; and there turning his sword into a pruning-hook, and sitting under his own vine, and his own figtree, till all human joys and anxieties were

alike at an end.

"He was startled by the trumpet that assembled his troop; he heard the trampling of their horses' hoofs, and their jovial voices as they mustered; never sounds came so dissonant to his ear. The hour had worn away in no undelighted though grave meditation; and a pilgrim passing down the avenue, with his scolloped hat, and habit brown with the dust of the Holy Land, the only living thing that had till then passed before his eye, had only mingled an abstracted and solitary image with the thick-coming fancies of his perturbed mind.

"He returned to the saloon, where he had held his conference with Justiniani the night. before, and where the ancient statesman and his daughter were waiting to bid him farewell. The parting was one of few words; presents were exchanged; and when Adriana added her's, an amulet which had just arriv ed from the holy sepulchre, and which had the repute of curing wounds, she gave it with an involuntary sigh, and an inward prayer, that its virtues might be never required.