Rosamund Gray was the most beautiful young creature that eyes ever beheld. Her face had the sweetest expression in it--a gentleness--a modesty--a timidity--a certain charm--a grace without a name.
There was a sort of melancholy mingled in her smile. It was not the thoughtless levity of a girl--it was not the restrained simper of premature womanhood--it was something which the poet Young might have remembered, when he composed that perfect line,
"Soft, modest, melancholy, female, fair."
She was a mild-eyed maid, and everybody loved her. Young Allan Clare, when but a boy, sighed for her.
Her yellow hair fell in bright and curling clusters, like
Her voice was trembling and musical. A graceful diffidence pleaded for her whenever she spake--and, if she said but little, that little found its way to the heart.
Young, and artless, and innocent, meaning no harm, and thinking none; affectionate as a smiling infant--playful, yet inobtrusive, as a weaned lamb--everybody loved her. Young Allan Clare, when but a boy, sighed for her.
The moon is shining in so brightly at my window, where I write, that I feel it a crime not to suspend my employment awhile to gaze at her.
See how she glideth, in maiden honor, through the clouds, who divide on either side to do her homage.
Beautiful vision!--as I contemplate thee, an internal harmony is communicated to my mind, a moral brightness, a tacit analogy of mental purity; a calm like _that_ we ascribe in fancy to the favored inhabitants of thy fairy regions, "argent fields."
I marvel not, O moon, that heathen people, in the "olden times," did worship thy deity--Cynthia, Diana, Hecate. Christian Europe invokes thee not by these names now--her idolatry is of a blacker stain: Belial is her God--she worships Mammon.
False things are told concerning thee, fair planet--for I will ne'er believe that thou canst take a perverse pleasure in distorting the brains of us, poor mortals. Lunatics! moonstruck! Calumny invented, and folly took up, these names. I would hope better things from thy mild aspect and benign influences.
Lady of Heaven, thou lendest thy pure lamp to light the way to the virgin mourner, when she goes to seek the tomb where her warrior lover lies.