s side too quickly to tie up its drooping petals or
refresh its dusty leaves. Close by the stir of the great city, with all
its fret and chafe and storm of life, in the desolate garden of that
sombre house, and under the withering eyes of relentless Crime, revived
the Arcady of old,--the scene vocal to the reeds of idyllist and
shepherd; and in the midst of the iron Tragedy, harmlessly and
unconsciously arose the strain of the Pastoral Music.

It would be a vain effort to describe the state of Lucretia's mind while
she watched the progress of the affection she had favoured, and gazed on
the spectacle of the fearless happiness she had promoted. The image of
a felicity at once so great and so holy wore to her gloomy sight the
aspect of a mocking Fury. It rose in contrast to her own ghastly and
crime-stained life; it did not upbraid her conscience with guilt so
loudly as it scoffed at her intellect for folly. These children, playing
on the verge of life, how much more of life's true secret did they
already know than she, with all her vast native powers and wasted realms
of blackened and charred experience! For what had she studied, and
schemed, and calculated, and toiled, and sinned? As a conqueror stricken
unto death would render up all the regions vanquished by his sword for
one drop of water to his burning lips, how gladly would she have given
all the knowledge bought with blood and fire, to feel one moment as
those children felt! Then, from out her silent and grim despair, stood
forth, fierce and prominent, the great fiend, Revenge.

By a monomania not uncommon to those who have made self the centre of
being, Lucretia referred to her own sullen history of wrong and passion
all that bore analogy to it, however distant. She had never been
enabled, without an intolerable pang of hate and envy, to contemplate
courtship and love in others. From the rudest shape to the most refined,
that master-passion in the existence, at least of woman,--reminding her
of her own brief episode of human tenderness and devotion,--opened every
wound and wrung every fibre of a heart that, while crime had indurated
it to most emotions, memory still left morbidly sensitive to one. But
if tortured by the sight of love in those who had had no connection with
her fate, who stood apart from her lurid orbit and were gazed upon only
afar (as a lost soul, from the abyss, sees the gleam of angels' wings
within some planet it never has explored), how inef