he sky, and therein
calmly sought a supernatural form, which should descend and bear her
up. She almost fancied she was dying then, and prayed thus: "Come,
thou angel of rest, come and take my heart, and bear it to my beloved.
Angel of rest! leave me not so long alone among the corses. Oh, God!
is there then nought invisible about me? Angel of death! thou must be
here, thou hast already snatched away two souls close by me, and hast
made them ascend. I, too, am dead, draw forth my glowing soul from its
cold kneeling corse."

With mad disquiet, she looked about in the vacant sky. Suddenly, in
that still desert, a star shone forth, and wound its way towards the
earth. She spread her arms in transport, and thought the angel of rest
was rushing towards her. Alas! the star passed away, but she did not.
"Not yet? Do I not die yet, All-merciful One?" sighed poor Rosamond.

In the east a cloud arose,--it passed over the moon, sailed in
loneliness across the clear sky, and stood over the most agonised heart
upon earth. She threw back her head, so as to face the cloud, and said
to the lightning, "Strike this head, and release my heart!" But the
cloud passed darkly over the head that was thrown back for it, and
flying down the sky, sunk behind the mountains. Then, with a thousand
tears, she cried, "Can I not die? Can I not die?"

Poor Rosamond! How did pain roll itself together, give an angry
serpent-spring at thy heart, and fix in it all its poisonous teeth.
But a weeping spirit poured the opium of insensibility into thine
heart, and the bursts of agony flowed away in a soft convulsion.

She awoke in the morning, but her mind was unsettled. She saw the sun
and the dead man, but her eye had lost all tears, and her burst heart
had, like a broken bell, lost all tone; she merely murmured, "Why can I
not die?" She went back cold into her hut, and said nothing but these
words. Every night she went half an hour later to the corpse, and
every time she met the rising moon, which was now broken, and said,
while she turned her mourning, tearless eye towards its gleaming
meadows, "Why cannot I die?"

Ay, why canst thou not, good soul? for the cold earth would have sucked
out of all thy wounds the last venom with which the human heart is laid
beneath its surface, just as the hand when buried in earth recovers
from the sting of a bee. But I turn mine eye away from thy pain, and
look up at the glimmering moon, where Eugeniu