URANIA

CONTENTS.

Part First.
—♦—
THE HEAVENLY MUSE.

I.
A DREAM OF YOUTH.

I WAS seventeen years old; her name was Urania.

Was Urania a fair, blue-eyed maiden, a dream of spring, an innocent but inquisitive daughter of Eve? No; she was simply, as in days of yore, that one of the nine Muses who presided over astronomy, and whose celestial glance inspired and directed the chorus of the spheres; she was the angelic idea which soars above terrestrial dulness. She had not the disturbing flesh, nor the heart whose palpitations are communicated at a distance, nor the gentle ardor of human life; but she existed nevertheless in a sort of ideal world,—lofty and always pure,—and yet she was human enough in name and form to produce a strong and deep impression upon an adolescent soul, to arouse in that soul an indefinite, indefinable feeling of admiration,—almost of love.

In his hours of solitude, and even through the intellectual labors