limpid, and perfectly harmonious, always creating pleasurable emotions, but rarely sublime ones. It never awakens an echo in my heart -never lifts my thoughts from earth; but, like the music of birds, it makes the earth more delightful, and the ear loves to drink in its dulcet tones. The voice of Malibran affects me as does sacred music; and I should dislike hearing it employed in singing light airs, as much as I should hearing a cathedral organ playing a waltz or contre-danse.

Lablache's is also a voice that has great charms for me. It comes pealing forth, grand and powerful as a choir in some lofty temple; while Rubini's always reminds me of the plaintive, never to be forgotten chant of the Miserere in the Sixtine chapel at Rome, which, though heard while I was yet only a child, I remember as distinctly as if it had been

but yesterday.

Who could support the effect of music to which we had last listened in the society of one beloved, if death had snatched for ever from us that object? I, who have, thank Heaven! never known the most bitter of all pangs, that of mourning for a dear friend, yet cannot hear serious music without feeling a profound, but sweet melancholy, that brings unbidden tears to my eyes, and thoughts of another world to my mind. To see people around me smiling, or conversing, while a grave harmony is holding communion with my spirit, seems little short of profanation; and I could never select such soulless beings for my friends.

You, dear Mary, will not smile at my enthusiastic admiration for music, when I tell you, that never is a sense of religion so strongly impressed on me as when I am listening to it. Yet, I fear, you will say, that religion ought not to be a matter of feeling, but a fixed and

immutable principle, over which external sights or sounds should have no influence, or, at all events, no control. But I was ever a creature

of impulses and instincts, one of the strongest of which is my affection for you an affection

that has never known a diminution in the heart

our home, and miss you so much that I have recourse to writing to you, in order to cheat myself into the belief that I am, as in past happy times, talking to my own Gusty. You must often repeat the assurances of your happiness, my blessed child, to console us for the loss of ours, which departed with you. Yet

I would not have you perfectly happy, Gusty, for I wish that you should feel the want of your mother, who so dearly loves you; and of your old fond father, too, who so unwisely spoiled you, by his incapability of denying you any thing, that, at length, you, knowing his weakness, asked him to consent to your abandonment of him; when he, silly, doting man that he was, gave up his only joy, his only comfort.

Ah! Gusty, you should not have left us so soon. Three years hence would have been quite time enough for you to have married. In that period, we might have reasoned ourselves into living without you-you might have grown less fond, less engaging, less dear to us. But no, that never could have been; the longer you might have remained with us, the less disposed should we have been to have parted

from you!

This place is totally changed. The trees look dark and gloomy, the lawns cheerless, the lakes still and sullen; and the birds seem to me to sing less gaily this year than I ever remember. Your mother, when I made this remark to her, said the change was in us, and not in the objects around. Perhaps she is right, my Gusty; yet I do love to fancy, that all nature is influenced by your absence- but this is the folly of an old doting father.

I look after your flower-garden myself:

every flower you loved seems to me to be a part of yourself; and I cherish them, as those fair and fragile things were never before cherished. Wise people would tell me, that all this is very silly and foolish; and so, I dare say, it is but I cannot repress the feeling, any more than I can the disclosure of it to you, my own darling; an impulse that I have always indulged, even at the time when you were a little