hip. Seasons when difficulties, against which
reason seems stricken into palsy, leave him bewildered in dismay--when
darkness, which experience cannot pierce, wraps the conscience, as sudden
night wraps the traveller in the desert--when error entangles his feet in
its inextricable web--when, still desirous of the right, he sees before
him but a choice of evil; and the Angel of the Past, with a flaming
sword, closes on him the gates of the Future. Then, Faith flashes on him,
with a light from the cloud. Then, he clings to Prayer as a drowning
wretch to the plank. Then, that solemn authority which clothes the
Priest, as the interpreter between the soul and the Divinity, seizes on
the heart that trembles with terror and joy; then, that mysterious
recognition of Atonement, of sacrifice, of purifying lustration (mystery
which lies hid in the core of all religions), smoothes the frown on the
Past, removes the flaming sword from the future. The Orestes escapes
from the hounding Furies, and follows the oracle to the spot where the
cleansing dews shall descend on the expiated guilt.

He who hath never known in himself, nor marked in another, such strange
crisis in human fate, cannot judge of the strength and the weakness it
bestows. But till he can so judge, the spiritual part of all history is
to him a blank scroll, a sealed volume. He cannot comprehend what drove
the fierce Heathen, cowering and humbled, into the fold of the Church;
what peopled Egypt with eremites; what lined the roads of Europe and Asia
with pilgrim homicides; what, in the elder world, while Jove yet reigned
on Olympus, is couched in the dim traditions of the expiation of Apollo,
the joy-god, descending into Hades; or why the sinner went blithe and
light-hearted from the healing lustrations of Eleusis. In all these
solemn riddles of the Jove world and the Christ's is involved the
imperious necessity that man hath of repentance and atonement: through
their clouds, as a rainbow, shines the covenant that reconciles the God
and the man.

Now Life with strong arms plucked the reviving Harold to itself. Already
the news of his return had spread through the city, and his chamber soon
swarmed with joyous welcomes and anxious friends. But the first
congratulations over, each had tidings that claimed his instant
attention, to relate. His absence had sufficed to loosen half the links
of that ill-woven empire.

All the North was in arms. Northumbria had revo