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It was indeed a lovely head; an Italian girl, three quarter face, painted after the manner of Leonardo, with firm but delicate touches, and lights and shades of infinite subtlety, and possessing, like all that master's portraits of women, a straightforward look that responds to the gazer's, but which he seeks to interrogate in vain.

Between the real landscape and its shadow in the water, there was no division; both were so untroubled and clear, and, while so fraught with solemn mystery of life and death, so hopefully reassuring to the gazer's soothed heart, because so tenderly and mercifully beautiful.

The surrounding landscape the dwelling place of the poet his tomb facing the heavens, and disdaining even the shadow of trees the half-effaced inscription of that hallowed shrine all these seemed appropriate, and melted the gazer's heart. How useless! how intrusive! are the superfluous decorations of art, amid the simpler scenes of nature. Ornament is here misplaced.

Above, the sky is literally purple with heat; and the pitiless light smites the gazer's weary eye as it comes back from the white shore. Nor does the plain country in that land offer the refuge and rest of our own soft green. The limestone rock underlies the vegetation, and gives a glittering, ashen hue to all the bare patches, and even to the cultivated parts which are burnt up early in the year.

It was indeed a lovely head; an Italian girl, three quarter face, painted after the manner of Leonardo, with firm but delicate touches, and lights and shades of infinite subtlety, and possessing, like all that master's portraits of women, a straightforward look that responds to the gazer's, but which he seeks to interrogate in vain.

It is the sunset gun from old Fort Niagara; and as stern reality becomes again a presence, the gazer's glance rests on the peaceful beauty of the broad blue Lake Ontario, on which, at this quiet hour, so many eyes, long turned to dust, have rested in the years forever flown.

Chariots of fire and horsemen of fire thronged it in every part. High up into the viewless air mounted their wheeling bands: rank beyond rank, and army beyond army, they seemed to stretch on into the vastness of space, until the gazer's wearied eye was unable to gaze on them. And all of these were gathered round his master. They were God's host, keeping guard over God's servant.

A very handsome young officer and lady who were with us did so, and then, facing round, stood there side by side, looking in the niche, if not like saints or angels wrought by pious hands in stone, as romantically, if not as holily, worthy the gazer's eye.

Trouble was written in every lineament. Trouble? How inadequately does the word express my meaning! Ah! at a single glance, what a volume of suffering was opened to the gazer's eye. Not lightly had the foot of time rested there, as if treading on odorous flowers, but heavily, and with iron-shod heel.

He was, indeed, a pitiable object to look upon The hat he had so recently purchased, bad as it was when it came into his possession, was now infinitely less presentable. In the severe trials it had undergone, in company with its unfortunate owner, it had lost its tip and half the brim. The countenance beneath it would, however, have absorbed the gazer's whole attention.