g to rejoin my
Idris and her babes. In reply, my sister requested me to accompany her the
following evening to the tomb of Raymond. Some days had passed since I had
visited the spot. The path to it had been enlarged, and steps hewn in the
rock led us less circuitously than before, to the spot itself; the platform
on which the pyramid stood was enlarged, and looking towards the south, in
a recess overshadowed by the straggling branches of a wild fig-tree, I saw
foundations dug, and props and rafters fixed, evidently the commencement of
a cottage; standing on its unfinished threshold, the tomb was at our
right-hand, the whole ravine, and plain, and azure sea immediately before
us; the dark rocks received a glow from the descending sun, which glanced
along the cultivated valley, and dyed in purple and orange the placid
waves; we sat on a rocky elevation, and I gazed with rapture on the
beauteous panorama of living and changeful colours, which varied and
enhanced the graces of earth and ocean.

"Did I not do right," said Perdita, "in having my loved one conveyed
hither? Hereafter this will be the cynosure of Greece. In such a spot death
loses half its terrors, and even the inanimate dust appears to partake of
the spirit of beauty which hallows this region. Lionel, he sleeps there;
that is the grave of Raymond, he whom in my youth I first loved; whom my
heart accompanied in days of separation and anger; to whom I am now joined
for ever. Never--mark me--never will I leave this spot. Methinks his
spirit remains here as well as that dust, which, uncommunicable though it
be, is more precious in its nothingness than aught else widowed earth
clasps to her sorrowing bosom. The myrtle bushes, the thyme, the little
cyclamen, which peep from the fissures of the rock, all the produce of the
place, bear affinity to him; the light that invests the hills participates
in his essence, and sky and mountains, sea and valley, are imbued by the
presence of his spirit. I will live and die here!

"Go you to England, Lionel; return to sweet Idris and dearest Adrian;
return, and let my orphan girl be as a child of your own in your house.
Look on me as dead; and truly if death be a mere change of state, I am
dead. This is another world, from that which late I inhabited, from that
which is now your home. Here I hold communion only with the has been, and
to come. Go you to England, and leave me where alone I can consent to drag
out the miserable days