her the vanquishers of death? All creation lies
before us: shall we cling to a grain of dust?
All immortality is our heritage: shall we gasp
and sicken for a moment’s breath? What
if we perish within an hour?—what if already
the black cloud lowers over us?—what if
from our hopes and projects, and the fresh woven ties
which we have knit around our life, we are abruptly
torn?—shall we be the creatures or the
conquerors of fate? Shall we be the exiled from
a home, or the escaped from a dungeon? Are we
not as birds which look into the Great Air only through
a barred cage? Shall we shrink and mourn when
the cage is shattered, and all space spreads around
us,— our element and our empire?
No; it was not for this that, in an elder day, Virtue
and Valour received but a common name! The soul,
into which that Spirit has breathed its glory, is
not only above Fate,—it profits by her
assaults! Attempt to weaken it, and you nerve
it with a new strength; to wound it, and you render
it more invulnerable; to destroy it, and you make
it immortal! This, indeed, is the Sovereign
whose realm every calamity increases, the Hero whose
triumph every invasion augments; standing on the last
sands of life, and encircled by the advancing waters
of Darkness and Eternity, it becomes in its expiring
effort doubly the Victor and the King!”
Impressed by the fervour of his companion, with a
sympathy almost approaching to awe, Lord Ulswater
pressed Mordaunt’s hand, but offered no reply;
and both, excited by the high theme of their conversation,
and the thoughts which it produced, moved in silence
from their post and walked slowly homeward.
Is it possible?
Is’t so? I can no longer what I would
No longer draw back at my liking! I
Must do the deed because I thought of it.
. . . . . .
What is thy enterprise,—thy aim, thy
object?
Hast honestly confessed it to thyself?
O bloody, frightful deed!
. . . . . .
Was that my purpose when we parted?
O God of Justice!—Coleridge:
Wallenstein.
We need scarcely say that one of the persons overheard
by Mr. Brown was Wolfe, and the peculiar tone of oratorical
exaggeration, characteristic of the man, has already
informed the reader with which of the two he is identified.
On the evening after the conversation—the
evening fixed for the desperate design on which he
had set the last hazard of his life—the
republican, parting from the companions with whom he
had passed the day, returned home to compose the fever
of his excited thoughts, and have a brief hour of
solitary meditation, previous to the committal of
that act which he knew must be his immediate passport
to the jail and the gibbet. On entering his
squalid and miserable home, the woman of the house,
a blear-eyed and filthy hag, who was holding to her
withered breast an infant, which, even in sucking the
