70 The Convent of Catania. [Jury, 
to no alleviation of her calamity. She was “like sweet bells jingled 
harsh and out of tune,” and never did it appear that their order and 
beauty could come again. Oh! how dreadful was the violence of her 
sorrow, which seemed a thing strange to one of such gentleness. Her 
songs which she had sung to him were forgotten, or only remembered 
in fragments to add intensity to her suffering. The ringlets of which 
the fairest lay, as she supposed, upon his clay-cold heart, now fell un- 
arrayed upon her shoulders. Weeping, and recounting the valour and 
attraction of him whom she could see no more, up and down the lonely 
corridors she wandered like a ghost—in vain appealed to, in vain 
hindered. 
But this season passed away ; and when the voice of the thunder- 
clap no longer rang in her ears, but was remembered only in a serener 
moment, the sorrow which had been almost frenzy, was tempered to an 
honourable regret. Her eye had lost its brilliancy, and she cared not 
for the world ;—for it was a desert to her, though all its sweetness, and 
grandeur, and eternal beauty were there, and only one of the countless 
ereatures gone from its surface. 
But her dejection was equable and rational ; and it was from a settled 
purpose, rather than at the impulse of an uncertain fancy, that she 
resolved to abandon her home and kindred, and in perpetual seclusion 
give to her God that broken heart which might have been too much 
given to a mortal being. She took the veil, and in the convent of which 
I spoke at the opening of this paper, was enrolled a member of the 
holy sisterhood. 
Time passed on; the Neapolitan warfare suffered a pause, and in the 
interval Montalto lost no time in returning to Catania. Upon his 
arrival, what was his dismay and astonishment, when informed of his 
supposed death, and the effect it had produced in the life of poor 
Rosina? 
Uncertain what steps to pursue eventually, it was his first natural 
impulse to inform her of his safety, and still enduring attachment. In 
an evil hour the announcement of this unexpected news visited her in 
her solitude. In an evil hour the chords of her mind were once more 
unstrung, and the harmonies newly heard were turned into dissonance. 
The sorrows of the past came upon her afresh, but under another aspect. 
Fer she had estranged herself from her love, and by her own act had 
effected that sad reverse, that horrible privation, which had been more 
tolerable, whatever else had been the cause.—What remedy now re- 
mained? With all its original force the tide of her love rolled in its 
former channels ; and the infirmity of human resolution could not now 
withstand the strength of the current. Her spirit was weaned from her 
holy occupations. Sickened with her garb, her daily duties, her associates, 
her very thoughts, she longed to cast off the self-imposed thraldom. 
Never to the eye of enthusiastic childhood, did the distant hill-tops gleam 
with suchabeauty as now that she contemplated them—alove-sick prisoner. 
The hopeless schemes of relief, which such a condition suggested, were 
all that now remained for her meditation and her solace. To abandon 
her rigid profession was impossible: to desert it and escape, seemed 
more practicable. By day, as she gazed through the grated windows at 
the fair prospect before and around her, this was the vision which came 
with every object and beautified the whole. By night, it filled the long 
interval between her faint slumbers ;—and as she slept, the more obscure 
