Till love, victorious o'er alarms,
Hid fears and blushes in his arms!
Such is the first picture; what is the second?
Alas! thought he, how changed that mien,
How changed those timid looks have been!
Since years of guilt and of disguise
Have arm'd the terrors of her eyes.
No more of virgin terror speaks
The blood that mantled in her cheeks:
Fierce and unfeminine are there,
Frenzy for joy, for grief despair."
It is the strangest problem of humanity—one too, for which the closest investigation can never quite account—to trace the progress by which innocence becomes guilt, and how those who formerly trembled to think of crime, are led on to commit that at which they once shuddered. The man the most steeped in wickedness, must have had his innocent and his happy moments—a child, he must have played in the sunshine with spirits as light as the golden curls that toss on the wind. His little hands must have been clasped in prayer at his mother's knee; he must, during some moment of youth's generous warmth, have pitied human suffering, and wondered how man's blood could ever be shed by man: and if this holds good of man—how much more so of woman! But that it is one of those stern truths which experience forces us to know—we never could believe in murder as a feminine crime; yet, from the days of Clytemnestra,
