LOVE AND MADNESS. 



17 



His name was W , and his father, a gentleman in opulent 



circumstances, is still resident in Dublin, where he was originally 

 destined for the profession of medicine, in the preparatory studies 

 for which he had made considerable advancement. It happened 

 that the hospital in which he was in the habit of attending clinical 

 lectures, and where a considerable portion of his time was spent, ad- 

 joined a private establishment for th^ care of insane patients, and the 

 garden of the one was separated from the grounds of the other by a 

 wall of inconsiderable height. One day, whilst lingering in the walks 

 in the rear of the hospital, his ear was struck with the plamtive notes 

 of a voice in the adjacent garden, which sang, with peculiar sweet- 

 ness, a melancholy Irish air; curiosity prompted him to see who the 

 minstrel was, and, clambering to an aperture in the dividing wall, 

 he saw immediately below him a beautiful girl, who sat in mournful 

 abstraction beneath a tree, plucking the leaves from a rose-bud as she 

 sang her plaintive ditty. As slie raised her head and observed the 

 stranger before her, she smiled and beckoned him to come to her ; 

 after a moment's hesitation, and reflection on the consequence, he 

 threw hiniself over the wall and seated himself beside her. Her 

 mind seemed in a state of perfect simplicity ; her disorder appeared 

 to have given her all the playful gentleness of childhood, and, as she 

 fixed her dark expressive eyes on him, she would smile and caress 

 him, and sing over and over the song she was trilling when he had 

 first heard her. Struck with the novelty of such a situation, and 



the beauty of the innocent and helpless being before him, W 



stayed long enough to avoid detection, and then returned by the 

 same means he had entered the garden, but not till she had induced 

 him to promise to come again and see her. 



The following day he returned and found her at the same spot, 

 where shfe said she had been singing for a long time before, in hopes 

 to attract his attention again. He now endeavoured to find out her 

 story) or the cause of her derangement, but his efforts were unavail- 

 ing, or her words so incoherent as to convey no connected meaning. 

 She was, however, more staid and melancholy while he remained 

 with her, and smiled and sighed, and wept and sang, by turns, till 

 it was time for him to again bid her adieu. With the exception of 

 those child-like wanderings, she betrayed no other marks of insan- 

 ity; her aberrations were merely playful and innocent: she was 

 often sad and melancholy, but oftener lively and light-spirited. 



W felt an excitement in her presence which he had never 



known before ; she appeared to him a pure child of Nature, in the 

 extreme of Nature's loveliness. She seemed not as one whom rea- 

 voL. II.— 1833. c 



