that sublimation of folly has palled upon my soul.
All this is now the fitter for my purpose.
Like these arabesque censers, my spirit is writhing
in fire, and the delirium of this scene is fashioning
me for the wilder visions of that land of real dreams
whither I am now rapidly departing.” He
here paused abruptly, bent his head to his bosom,
and seemed to listen to a sound which I could not hear.
At length, erecting his frame, he looked upwards,
and ejaculated the lines of the Bishop of Chichester:
"Stay for me there!
I will not fail
To meet thee in that
hollow vale."
In the next instant, confessing the power of the wine,
he threw himself at full-length upon an ottoman.
A quick step was now heard upon the staircase,
and a loud knock at the door rapidly succeeded.
I was hastening to anticipate a second disturbance,
when a page of Mentoni’s household burst into
the room, and faltered out, in a voice choking with
emotion, the incoherent words, “My mistress!
— my mistress! — Poisoned! — poisoned!
Oh, beautiful — oh, beautiful Aphrodite!”
Bewildered, I flew to the ottoman, and endeavored
to arouse the sleeper to a sense of the startling
intelligence. But his limbs were rigid —
his lips were livid — his lately beaming eyes
were riveted in death. I staggered back
towards the table — my hand fell upon a cracked
and blackened goblet — and a consciousness of
the entire and terrible truth flashed suddenly over
my soul.
~~~ End of Text ~~~
======
Impia tortorum longos hic turba furores
Sanguinis innocui, non satiata, aluit.
Sospite nunc patria, fracto nunc funeris antro,
Mors ubi dira fuit vita salusque patent.
[Quatrain composed for the gates of a market to
be erected upon the site of the Jacobin Club House
at Paris.]
I WAS sick — sick unto death with that
long agony; and when they at length unbound me, and
I was permitted to sit, I felt that my senses were
leaving me. The sentence — the dread
sentence of death — was the last of distinct
accentuation which reached my ears. After that,
the sound of the inquisitorial voices seemed merged
in one dreamy indeterminate hum. It conveyed
to my soul the idea of revolution — perhaps
from its association in fancy with the burr of a mill
wheel. This only for a brief period; for presently
I heard no more. Yet, for a while, I saw; but
with how terrible an exaggeration! I saw the lips
of the black-robed judges. They appeared to me
white — whiter than the sheet upon which
I trace these words — and thin even to
grotesqueness; thin with the intensity of their expression
of firmness — of immoveable resolution
— of stern contempt of human torture.
I saw that the decrees of what to me was Fate, were
still issuing from those lips. I saw them writhe
with a deadly locution. I saw them fashion the
