Fond of the early star, and lie awake Gazing with many thoughts upon the moon, Cheerful thoughts Came to the homesick boy as he became Has blotted many a pleasant memory Of boyhood out, and we are wearing old With the unplayfulness of this grown up world. his THE FANCY BALL. "Thou art spotless as the snow, lady mine, lady mine! Ere the noon upon it glow, lady mine! But the noon must have its ray, And the snow wreaths melt away, And hearts-why should not they? "WHAT shall be my character, coz?" said Gerald Grey, lifting up eyes from a book of costumes he had been turning over for some time, and addressing a dark eyed, Cleopatra looking girl, who sat on the opposite side of the round table; "shall it be Turk or Christian, Jew or Gentleman, Richard or Saladin, Peasant or Peer, King or Cobbler, Sailor or Saint, Peter the Great or Peter the Hermit? Shall I wear kilt or trowsers? shall I wear turban or helmet? shall I carry a sword or a show box? shall I go en attendant to yourself and be the envy of the rooms, or play Shadow to Silence in the corner there, and be overlooked by the whole world?" The lady last alluded to sat apart from the circle, netting a silk purse with the persevering industry which apologizes so prettily for abstraction when one wishes to dream in company. She was a fair, delicate girl, with a blue eye shaded heavily with dark lashes, and a mouth of exquisite refinement. Her figure was slenderer, and her whole air in strong contrast with the imposing and queenly beauty of her sister. "Tell, me Cecile," continued the young man, moving his chair up to the side of the silent girl, and lowering his tone to a half-audible murmur, which we have not the effrontery to ascribe to a mere cousinly regard, "may I take a character, my dear cousin, which will give me an apology to be near you?” The answer was probably an unexpected one, for he rose with a flushed cheek, and, bidding a confused adieu, left the room. Gerald Grey, (a pretty name for a hero-is it not, lady?) had intruded on one of those veriest eras in these times of illumination, a domestic evening. The round table stood in the centre of the room; the suspended lamp shed a soft, well tempered light on the fair faces beneath, and the Lehigh coal-we cannot conceive of a more expressive eulogy-burned! I should love dearly to tell you, now, after the manner of story-tellers of distinction, how the "mother had the remains of beauty in her noble countenance," and how tall, and how charitable to the poor, and what sweet singers, the daughters were; and I should like, if I thought you would not know it was a lie, to tell you how the gentleman sitting there with his cravat tied so transcendantly happened to come by as they were both drowning in some river, and gallantly got them out of the water and in love, and what colored eyes he had, and how there was a secret mystery about his birth, and a mark on his left arm, and how beautifully he had taught Whimsiculo, their aunt Tabitha's lap dog, to stand on his hind legs and ask for muffins, thereby winning forever and ever the heart of that immortal spinster, who hated every body else and was as rich as the bank. It goes to my heart to tell a story right on like a newspaper. The days of romance are gone, however, and the poetry that used to be trolled to the tinkle of a guitar under my lady's window, is now written with a slate and ci, and the teller of a tale is positively expected to be intelligible and preserve some faint resemblance to nature. Without ghost, and in good grammar therefore, I am compelled to state simply that Gerald Grey was an intimate visitor in the family; that, by the intermarriage of some relatives of indefinite removal, he had a sufficient right to the precious appellation of "cousin ;" that he had never seen the fair sisters till some few months before, when he returned from a long foreign residence, and that, being handsome and talented, and above all, remarkably well skilled in the manége des amants, and the mysteries of etiquette and Dr. Kitchener, he had made himself especially agreeable to every member of the circle. pen It was predicted by those who can see such things before they happen, that Mr. Gerald Grey would fall directly in love with Miss Helen (excuse the sirname, dear reader! a lady never has one in a story,) and the same good observers were confirmed in their opinion by the infallible test of appearances. It could not be denied that Helen was a magnificent creature. Her figure was large and full, without excess, and her motion had that indolent and floating grace with which women pass in dreams, and which is so particularly indescribable. She was a noble hearted and sincere girl, without either genius or susceptibility, but she smiled like a goddess, and had that beautiful gift of modest, lady-like self-possession which becomes a woman so infinitely. She was the most fascinating creature in the world. Every body was in love with her but our hero. He waited on her constantly, and interrupted every body else's attentions to her, and seemed to all eyes to live only for her favor; but it was because she was the most admired woman in society, and because he had seen enough of fashion to know that the safest and most distinguishing thing a man can do, is to get himself reported the lover of the finest woman he knows. There was a perfect understanding between them, and as "falling in love" was an accident to which no belle is liable, there was no possible danger in the intimacy, and a great deal of positive convenience. She could call upon him for all those little services which it is such a condescension to allow, and which, of course, one hates to have indifferent people do. She could give him her fan to hold without the danger of receiving back a red hot sonnet in its folds; and she could faint away in his arms without troubling herself to be elegant in the disposition of her person; and then he decoyed away all her dull admirers, and she had a standing engagement to dance with him, to avoid stupid partners; and she could call him when she was tired of talking, to stand by and be agreeable while she was silent. He called her carriage, and tied her slipper, and flirted her fan, and told her all the scandal, and was her dictionary to all the strange people, and her interpreter to all the foreign lions, and her confidential secretary in all etiquettical correspondence. He was the most delightful of cousins. She was sure he would never fall in love with her, and as for herself, the tenderest thought she had, was to wish, sometimes, in the rainy mornings, when she wanted to be amused, that he was her brother. Had Gerald seen less of the world, he would, to the best of our knowledge, have done just what every body expected him to do. To those who know too little of women and to those who know too much, a belle is irresistible. The unsettled taste of the one is bewildered by the same splendor that is necessary to the morbid taste of the other. But he had been in love with a hundred such women as Helen. They are universal. He had met them in every country he had seen, and had paid so often the general tribute, that he knew its value. He remembered enough of his metaphysics, too, to be aware that admiration leaves a perpetual thirst, and though he had the highest respect for Helen, and believed that she had all the proper feelings of a woman, he knew that the incense of fashion had unstrung, as it must ever, the delicate fibres of affection which constitute susceptibility, and that the quiet pulse of matrimony must be the veriest languor to a mind of such habitual excitement. He admired and respected the glorious creature-but he did not love her. He did love Cecile. Not at first, and not all at once, as people do in story books. He began with talking to her about poetry; and from that, (for she was, like all enthusiastic girls, a superb visionary) to discoursing of influences, and dreams, and wild theories of the stars; and then, by the most natural gradation possible, they came to the philosophy of feeling; and then-and then-it is difficult to say what then! He lent her his books with the passages all marked, and sent her his portfolio of drawings, and his scrap books, and his foreign album, and even, (a desperate unprincipled thing is love!) showed her a package tied with a blue ribbon, and marked "to be burned in case of my death," containing all the billets-doux and watch papers, and bad poetry that had been sent to him in his thousand by-gone flirtations. And then there was such delicate flattery in his gifts of flowers! He was the pest of the flower pots for miles round. In the barrenest of seasons the heads of the sisters were decked with the freshest and most fragrant, bought and begged and stolen from hot houses and old maids, and his sister's plant closet, and always presented with a distinctive appropriateness worthy of a prime minister of Flora. Without looking at the label, Helen knew the large, magnificent bunch, with red and crimson and yellow cups, was for her, and the other-a simple white Japonica perhaps, or a lily of the valley half hid in its own leaf, or a rose bud, or a lemon blossom-Agnes put in her bosom by instinct, without looking once, (till she got to her chamber) at the French note which lay perdúe among the stems, like a Love among the roses. Gerald had seen a great deal of women. He had been, (we fear it must be confessed) a desperate flirt. He had sworn fidelity to eyes of every color and characters of every cast. He had been on the brink of fifty engagements, and mercy knows how many pretty tombstones with half blown roses on them should come out of his pocket money. But in all his experience he had never found so pure hearted and lovely a being as his fair haired and gentle cousin. She was a very spirit in comparison with other girls. Her thoughts were all beautiful and pure, and with her thin, graceful figure, and the almost perfect transparency of color in her lip and cheek, what is the wonder if her lover sometimes thought her an angel? I have known lovers as extravagant upon lighter evidence. It goes to my heart to say a word against a hero : but it would not be becoming in a veracious historian to hold up false models of perfection. It discourages posterity. With many good and some indifferent qualities then, Gerald had one fault-a morbid sensitiveness upon matters of feeling, which gave him much unnecessary trouble. To be sure, it was an excellence overgrown. Nothing half so much increases the value of life as a sensibility to its moral delicacies. If well governed it is an invaluable gift in a lover, being, as it is, the basis of all refinements, and the only thing that can preserve the freshness and first beauty of an affection. But in our hero's wandering and many colored attachments, his sensibility had become diseased from over exercise, and a chance word that would nct have occasioned a thought to him once was now matter for serious uneasiness. Philosopher as he was upon most subjects, he never gave himself time to reason upon feeling, and followed his first impulse with the headlong precipitation of a boy. Even in his comparatively brief acquaintance with Cecile, this quality had been the cause of much misunderstanding. Like all men of this temperament he was fervent to romance in his attachments, and every word he uttered to the woman he loved was breathed into her ear with the delicacy and earnest tenderness of a first avowal. At home and abroad, his slight but flattering assiduities were ever unremitted. His high breeding and extreme tact enabled him to do this without attracting notice, and it was his unreasonableness that he expected from Cecile the same constant evidences of affection. He was by education a man of universal self-command and accomplishment. Without any apparent effort or absence of mind, he never lost sight of the woman he admired in company. He was gay and general in his attentions, and was too well bred to engross her beyond the most impalpable limit of propriety; but, in the midst of a conversation in which his apparent interest was flattering in the most delicate manner the person to whom it was addressed, his careless but rapid glances caught every smile upon the face he loved, and laid up for his dreams every grace of gesture and motion. He possessed, too, that kind of ventriloquism which men of gallantry always acquire, and by which, in the midst of a crowd, and without the appearance of a whisper, the voice is thrown into the ear for which it is intended, and is entirely inaudible to every other. He could thus talk of the subject nearest his heart in the gayest company, and, with his habitual command of countenance, could make a declaration in a dance, without betraying to the most scrutinizing eye more than the superficial interest of a flirtation. He thus made every party the scene of a teté-a-teté and advanced his suit in situations where most men would not trust them |