Eighth

 Ah, happy hills! - ah, pleasing shades!
 Ah, fields beloved in vain!
 Where once my careless childhood stray'd,
 A stranger yet to pain.
                                                       Ode on a Distant Prospect
                                                                of Eton College.
 
It is not by corporal wants and infirmities only that men of the most
distinguished talents are levelled, during their lifetime, with the common mass
of mankind. There are periods of mental agitation when the firmest of mortals
must be ranked with the weakest of his brethren; and when, in paying the general
tax of humanity, his distresses are even aggravated by feeling that he
transgresses, in the indulgence of his grief, the rules of religion and
philosophy, by which he endeavours in general to regulate his passions and his
actions. It was during such a paroxysm that the unfortunate Morton left
Fairy-Knowe. To know that his long-loved and still beloved Edith, whose image
had filled his mind for so many years, was on the point of marriage to his early
rival, who had laid claim to her heart by so many services, as hardly left her a
title to refuse his addresses, bitter as the intelligence was, yet came not as
an unexpected blow.
    During his residence abroad he had once written to Edith. It was to bid her
farewell for ever, and to conjure her to forget him. He had requested her not to
answer his letter, yet he half hoped, for many a day, that she might transgress
his injunction. The letter never reached her to whom it was addressed, and
Morton, ignorant of its miscarriage, could only conclude himself laid aside and
forgotten, according to his own self-denying request. All that he had heard of
their mutual relations since his return to Scotland, prepared him to expect that
he could only look upon Miss Bellenden as the betrothed bride of Lord Evandale;
and, even if freed from the burden of obligation to the latter, it would still
have been inconsistent with Morton's generosity of disposition to disturb their
arrangements, by attempting the assertion of a claim, proscribed by absence,
never sanctioned by the consent of friends, and barred by a thousand
circumstances of difficulty. Why, then, did he seek the cottage which their
broken fortunes had now rendered the retreat of Lady Margaret Bellenden and her
grand-daughter? He yielded, we are under the necessity of acknowledging, to the
impulse of an inconsistent with which many might have felt in his situation.
    Accident apprised him, while travelling towards his native district, that
the ladies, near whose mansion he must necessarily pass, were absent; and