sable robe. Next appears a shade of ruined loveliness with dust among
her golden hair and her bright garments all faded and defaced,
stealing from your glance with drooping head, as fearful of reproach:
she was your fondest hope, but a delusive one; so call her
Disappointment now. A sterner form succeeds, with a brow of wrinkles,
a look and gesture of iron authority; there is no name for him unless
it be Fatality--an emblem of the evil influence that rules your
fortunes, a demon to whom you subjected yourself by some error at the
outset of life, and were bound his slave for ever by once obeying him.
See those fiendish lineaments graven on the darkness, the writhed lip
of scorn, the mockery of that living eye, the pointed finger touching
the sore place in your heart! Do you remember any act of enormous
folly at which you would blush even in the remotest cavern of the
earth? Then recognize your shame.

Pass, wretched band! Well for the wakeful one if, riotously miserable,
a fiercer tribe do not surround him--the devils of a guilty heart that
holds its hell within itself. What if Remorse should assume the
features of an injured friend? What if the fiend should come in
woman's garments with a pale beauty amid sin and desolation, and lie
down by your side? What if he should stand at your bed's foot in the
likeness of a corpse with a bloody stain upon the shroud? Sufficient
without such guilt is this nightmare of the soul, this heavy, heavy
sinking of the spirits, this wintry gloom about the heart, this
indistinct horror of the mind blending itself with the darkness of the
chamber.

By a desperate effort you start upright, breaking from a sort of
conscious sleep and gazing wildly round the bed, as if the fiends were
anywhere but in your haunted mind. At the same moment the slumbering
embers on the hearth send forth a gleam which palely illuminates the
whole outer room and flickers through the door of the bedchamber, but
cannot quite dispel its obscurity. Your eye searches for whatever may
remind you of the living world. With eager minuteness you take note of
the table near the fireplace, the book with an ivory knife between its
leaves, the unfolded letter, the hat and the fallen glove. Soon the
flame vanishes, and with it the whole scene is gone, though its image
remains an instant in your mind's eye when darkness has swallowed the
reality. Throughout the chamber there is the same obscurity as before,
but not the same gloo