ng for
a triumph that is to be another's loss, the triumph comes suddenly, and
we shudder at it, because it is held out by the chill hand of death.

Our arrival in Prague happened at night, and I was glad of this, for it
seemed like a deferring of a terribly decisive moment, to be in the city
for hours without seeing it. As we were not to remain long in Prague,
but to go on speedily to Dresden, it was proposed that we should drive
out the next morning and take a general view of the place, as well as
visit some of its specially interesting spots, before the heat became
oppressive--for we were in August, and the season was hot and dry. But
it happened that the ladies were rather late at their morning toilet, and
to my father's politely-repressed but perceptible annoyance, we were not
in the carriage till the morning was far advanced. I thought with a
sense of relief, as we entered the Jews' quarter, where we were to visit
the old synagogue, that we should be kept in this flat, shut-up part of
the city, until we should all be too tired and too warm to go farther,
and so we should return without seeing more than the streets through
which we had already passed. That would give me another day's
suspense--suspense, the only form in which a fearful spirit knows the
solace of hope. But, as I stood under the blackened, groined arches of
that old synagogue, made dimly visible by the seven thin candles in the
sacred lamp, while our Jewish cicerone reached down the Book of the Law,
and read to us in its ancient tongue--I felt a shuddering impression that
this strange building, with its shrunken lights, this surviving withered
remnant of medieval Judaism, was of a piece with my vision. Those
darkened dusty Christian saints, with their loftier arches and their
larger candles, needed the consolatory scorn with which they might point
to a more shrivelled death-in-life than their own.

As I expected, when we left the Jews' quarter the elders of our party
wished to return to the hotel. But now, instead of rejoicing in this, as
I had done beforehand, I felt a sudden overpowering impulse to go on at
once to the bridge, and put an end to the suspense I had been wishing to
protract. I declared, with unusual decision, that I would get out of the
carriage and walk on alone; they might return without me. My father,
thinking this merely a sample of my usual "poetic nonsense," objected
that I should only do myself harm by walking in the h