Page:The New Monthly Magazine - Volume 011.djvu/50

quite effaced from my remembrance. The Emily I had loved in her early bloom rose before me, a thousand frolics and pleasures accompanied the image, and scenes and feelings long faded, started into vivid colours at the sound.

While in Scotland I fell more than half in love with a young Highland beauty, in silken snood and robe of plaid, whom I met at an Edinburgh ball; but as this was only three months after I had assured my father that my attachment to Emily could end but with my life, I thought I should look rather ridiculous if I broke my resolution so soon. I checked, therefore, my budding passion, and sighed and looked miserable a little longer. During the Christmas holidays I had to subdue another threatening penchant towards an agreeable cousin; and set off for Oxford without having regularly forfeited my reputation for constancy.

Within a few miles of my new residence lived a clergyman and his wife, who had one fair daughter, just returned from a fashionable school, her head full of novels and nonsense, and her heart, like a highly charged electrie jar, ready to explode at the slightest touch of a lover's finger. Chance threw me first in her way. One fine evening in spring I helped her over a stile, and this was obliged to suffice instead of rescuing her from a ruffian or a mad bull. In love we fell most romantically, and nursed the flame by concealment and strategem. This was a most sentimental, serious concern; I soon learned to despise the merry-making style of my former attachment, to consider a smile as high treason against the doubts and anxieties of love, and to think that "all lovers should look melancholy mad." We sighed to the sighing groves, sate pensive under trees, quoted Petrarch, preferred the moon to the sun, and gave many other signs of eternal affection. Of course I became a poet, at least (I beg pardon of half a dozen living authors) I began to write in rhyme. I read my verses to my charmer, who was celebrated in them by the name of Fiordelisa. She was delighted with my effusions, compared them with the compositions of our best poets, requested copies of them, which she kept in a rose-coloured satin French pocket-book trimmed with silver, and urged me incessantly to show my extraordinary talents to the world, and publish a volume of poems. I did not love my Fiordelisa the less for her favourable opinion of my infant muse, and my flattered vanity soon persuaded me that her judgment and taste were peculiarly correct. I began to prepare my verses for the press, and for all the immortality which fine wove paper can bestow. Already I heard in fancy the wonder, the suspicions, and admiration which would follow their anonymous publication, and Fiordelisa was evidently most impatient for the time when her charms would be recorded in print. We never met without my reading to her some new addition to the tiny bulk of my future volume. How well can I remember the spot, the scene of the lover's and the author's delusions. It was a small wood, from which the brushwood had been cleared, and the extreme unevenness of the ground denoted that it had at some distant period been dug for chalk or gravel. Now, however, every miniature mountain and fairy valley was covered with a fresh green turf, and shaded by trees of fifteen or twenty years' growth. The lively verdure of the grass was here diversified by the deeper,