"It cannot! it cannot!" cried Trevylyan, wildly; "be still, be silent, I
beseech you."

"Look yonder," said Du-----e, breaking seasonably in upon the
conversation of the lovers; "on that hill to the left, what once was
an abbey is now an asylum for the insane. Does it not seem a quiet and
serene abode for the unstrung and erring minds that tenant it? What
a mystery is there in our conformation!--those strange and bewildered
fancies which replace our solid reason, what a moral of our human
weakness do they breathe!"

It does indeed induce a dark and singular train of thought, when, in the
midst of these lovely scenes, we chance upon this lone retreat for those
on whose eyes Nature, perhaps, smiles in vain. _Or is it in vain?_ They
look down upon the broad Rhine, with its tranquil isles: do their wild
delusions endow the river with another name, and people the valleys
with no living shapes? Does the broken mirror within reflect back the
countenance of real things, or shadows and shapes, crossed, mingled, and
bewildered,--the phantasma of a sick man's dreams? Yet, perchance, one
memory unscathed by the general ruin of the brain can make even the
beautiful Rhine more beautiful than it is to the common eye; can calm
it with the hues of departed love, and bids its possessor walk over its
vine-clad mountains with the beings that have ceased to _be_! There,
perhaps, the self-made monarch sits upon his throne and claims the
vessels as his fleet, the waves and the valleys as his own; there, the
enthusiast, blasted by the light of some imaginary creed, beholds the
shapes of angels, and watches in the clouds round the setting sun
the pavilions of God; there the victim of forsaken or perished love,
mightier than the sorcerers of old, evokes the dead, or recalls the
faithless by the philter of undying fancies. Ah, blessed art thou, the
winged power of Imagination that is within us! conquering even grief,
brightening even despair. Thou takest us from the world when reason can
no longer bind us to it, and givest to the maniac the inspiration and
the solace of the bard! Thou, the parent of the purer love, lingerest
like love, when even ourself forsakes us, and lightest up the shattered
chambers of the heart with the glory that makes a sanctity of decay.

CHAPTER XXIX. ELLFELD.--MAYENCE.--HEIDELBERG.--A CONVERSATION BETWEEN
VANE AND THE GERMAN STUDENT.--THE RUINS OF THE CASTLE OF HEIDELBERG AND
ITS SOLITARY HABITANT.

IT was