Présentation de l'éditeur
Jane Sinclair; OE, THE FAWN OF SPRINGY ALE. Vr there be one object in life that stirs the current of human feehng more sadly than another, it is a yoirng and lovely woman, whose intellect has been bhghted by the trettchery of him on whose heart, as on a shrine, she oifered up the incense of her first affection. Such a being not only draws around her our tenderest and most dehcate sympathies, but fills us with that mournful impression of early desolation, resembhng so much the spirit of melancholy romance that arises fi-om one of those sad and gloomy breezes which sweep unexpectedly over the sleeping sui face of a summer lake, or moans with a tone of wail and soitow through the green fohage of the wood under whose cooling shade we sink into our noon-day dream. Madness is at all times a thing of fearful mystery, but when it puts itseK forth in a female gifted with youth and beauty, the pathos it causes becomes too refined for the grossness of ordinary sorrow almost transcends our notion of the real, and assumes that wild interest which invests it with the dim and visionaiy Ught of the ideal. Such a malady constitutes the veiy romance of aflliction, and gives to the fair sufferer rather the appearance of an angel fallen without guilt, than that of a being moulded for mortal purposes. WT io ever could look upon such a beautiful ruin without feeling the heart sink, and the mind overshadowed with a solemn darkness, as if conscious of witnessing the still and awful gloom of that disastrous echpse of reason, which, alas! is so often doomed never to pass away. It is difficult to account for the mingled reverence, and terror, and pity with which we look upon the insane, and it is equally strange that in this case we approach the temple of the mind with deeper homage, when we know that the divinity has passed out of it. It must be fi om a conviction of ithis that unciv
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