up its abode within me or rather incorporated itself with my weaker being.
The holy visitant has for a time slept, perhaps to show me how powerless I
am without its inspiration. Yet, stay for a while, O Power of goodness and
strength; disdain not yet this rent shrine of fleshly mortality, O immortal
Capability! While one fellow creature remains to whom aid can be afforded,
stay by and prop your shattered, falling engine!"

His vehemence, and voice broken by irrepressible sighs, sunk to my heart;
his eyes gleamed in the gloom of night like two earthly stars; and, his
form dilating, his countenance beaming, truly it almost seemed as if at his
eloquent appeal a more than mortal spirit entered his frame, exalting him
above humanity. He turned quickly towards me, and held out his hand.
"Farewell, Verney," he cried, "brother of my love, farewell; no other weak
expression must cross these lips, I am alive again: to our tasks, to our
combats with our unvanquishable foe, for to the last I will struggle
against her."

He grasped my hand, and bent a look on me, more fervent and animated than
any smile; then turning his horse's head, he touched the animal with the
spur, and was out of sight in a moment.

A man last night had died of the plague. The quiver was not emptied, nor
the bow unstrung. We stood as marks, while Parthian Pestilence aimed and
shot, insatiated by conquest, unobstructed by the heaps of slain. A
sickness of the soul, contagious even to my physical mechanism, came over
me. My knees knocked together, my teeth chattered, the current of my blood,
clotted by sudden cold, painfully forced its way from my heavy heart. I did
not fear for myself, but it was misery to think that we could not even save
this remnant. That those I loved might in a few days be as clay-cold as
Idris in her antique tomb; nor could strength of body or energy of mind
ward off the blow. A sense of degradation came over me. Did God create man,
merely in the end to become dead earth in the midst of healthful vegetating
nature? Was he of no more account to his Maker, than a field of corn
blighted in the ear? Were our proud dreams thus to fade? Our name was
written "a little lower than the angels;" and, behold, we were no better
than ephemera. We had called ourselves the "paragon of animals," and, lo!
we were a "quint-essence of dust." We repined that the pyramids had
outlasted the embalmed body of their builder. Alas! the mere shepherd's hut
of stra