the image of power, dark, isolated, impenetrable.  Stanton forgot his cowardly guide, his loneliness, his danger amid an approaching storm and an inhospitable country, where his name and country would shut every door against him, and every peal of thunder would be supposed justified by the daring intrusion of a heretic in the dwelling of an old Christian, as the Spanish Catholics absurdly term themselves, to mark the distinction between them and the baptized Moors.

All this was forgot in contemplating the glorious and awful scenery before him,—­light struggling with darkness,—­and darkness menacing a light still more terrible, and announcing its menace in the blue and livid mass of cloud that hovered like a destroying angel in the air, its arrows aimed, but their direction awfully indefinite.  But he ceased to forget these local and petty dangers, as the sublimity of romance would term them, when he saw the first flash of the lightning, broad and red as the banners of an insulting army whose motto is Vae victis, shatter to atoms the remains of a Roman tower;—­the rifted stones rolled down the hill, and fell at the feet of Stanton.  He stood appalled, and, awaiting his summons from the Power in whose eye pyramids, palaces, and the worms whose toil has formed them, and the worms who toil out their existence under their shadow or their pressure, are perhaps all alike contemptible, he stood collected, and for a moment felt that defiance of danger which danger itself excites, and we love to encounter it as a physical enemy, to bid it “do its worst,” and feel that its worst will perhaps be ultimately its best for us.  He stood and saw another flash dart its bright, brief, and malignant glance over the ruins of ancient power, and the luxuriance of recent fertility.  Singular contrast!  The relics of art forever decaying,—­the productions of nature forever renewed.—­(Alas! for what purpose are they renewed, better than to mock at the perishable monuments which men try in vain to rival them by.) The pyramids themselves must perish, but the grass that grows between their disjointed stones will be renewed from year to year.

Stanton was thinking thus, when all power of thought was suspended, by seeing two persons bearing between them the body of a young, and apparently very lovely girl, who had been struck dead by the lightning.  Stanton approached, and heard the voices of the bearers repeating, “There is none who will mourn for her!” “There is none who will mourn for her!” said other voices, as two more bore in their arms the blasted and blackened figure of what had once been a man, comely and graceful;—­“there is not one to mourn for her now!” They were lovers, and he had been consumed by the flash that had destroyed her, while in the act of endeavoring to defend her.  As they were about to remove the bodies, a person approached with a calmness of step and demeanor, as if he were alone unconscious of danger, and incapable of fear; and after looking