thy pursuit of this youth; look well to it, and prosper!"

66

"Forget it, Father? Forget it?" -returned the Page, and a scornful smile curled his lip. Forget it? Sooner may I cease to remember the existence of the sun, even when I am basking in his beams! No, Father, I shall never forget it, for to that one centre all my hopes are bound!"

"And do you gain on him smoothly, child?" demanded Valerius ; “ and are you imperceptibly winning from him every emotion of earthly feeling and of earthly tenderness of which that heart of his is susceptible? Does he desire companionship with you? Does he seek to unite you to him indissolúbly? Does he endeavour, by all means, to render your unavoidable separations less frequent and less prolonged?"

"Father," replied the Page with a

smile which it would be difficult to analyze, for joy and bitterness seemed to struggle there. "I have won on him to care so much for my soul, that he believes it entirely surrendered up to him. He has singled me out as a fit subject for the disciplines, the privations, the apparel of a monastic life! He hath a strange envy to see this face bedecked with a cowl, and to submit this irregularly growing hair of mine to the clerical tonsure! What more would you desire, Father? He thinks me his convert ; value the thing

Doth not the

and will he not he has preserved ? meanest wretch a man hath saved from destruction, become valuable to him when he hath striven for his safety ? Will not the holy Lewen love the novice whom he hath gained from the desert of the world? Oh, Father, will he not?"

"But his passions, his passions, can.

you not touch the key-note of them ?" demanded Valerius, impatiently.

"Passions! Father he is not a man of earthly passions, such as we possess ! His passions are all of the same bent as the aspirings of his soul; they point Heaven-ward !"

CHAPTER IX.

"How sweetly did they float upon the wings
Of silence, through the empty-vaulted night,
At every fall smoothing the raven-down
Of darkness till it smiled!

I took it for a fairy vision

Of some gay creatures of the element,
That in the colours of the rainbow live,
And play i' th' plighted clouds."

Comus.

ON the following midnight Lewen again sought the scene of his conference with the Confessor, and he sought it by the appointment of Vale rius.

It was very gloomy. Thick clouds scudded athwart the Heavens, blown.

with a tempestuousness that rocked them like the billows of ocean. The rays of the stars pierced not through their murky veil, and the moon was buried in dusky shadow. A visionary mind might have imagined every heaving wave of the sky the car of a spirit; might have called the whole a celestial navy sailing through the ether, and exploring the worlds with which space teems. Lewen looked upwards, and the eye of his mind rested not on the blackening canopy above him; it pierced through it, and penetrated even to the splendour of the empyrean. In place of darkness and gloom, he saw the "Holy Jerusalem, descending out of "Heaven from God, having the glory "of God and her light was like "unto a stone most precious, even like "a jasper stone, clear as crystal." He saw the burning of the twelve precious stones of the foundations of the