ul. No painter could
reproduce on canvas the sublime scenery sketched in its prologue; more
gloomy than the pictures of Ruysdael, more sombre than those of Salvator
Rosa. Before describing the inundation of the masses, our author
naturally recalls the traditions of the Flood. The nobles, the
representatives of the Past, with their few surviving adherents, have
taken refuge in their last stronghold, the fortress of the Holy Trinity,
securely situated upon a high and rocky peak overhanging a deep valley,
surrounded and hedged in by steep cliffs and rocky precipices. Through
these straits and passes once howled and swept the waters of the deluge.
As wild an inundation is now upon them, for the valley is almost filled
with the living surges of the myriads of the 'New Men,' who are rolling
their millions into its depths. But everything is hidden from view by an
ocean of heavy vapor, wrapping the whole landscape in its white, chill,
clinging shroud. The last and only banner of the Cross now raised upon
the face of the earth, streams from the highest tower of the castle of
the Holy Trinity; it alone pierces through and floats above the cold,
vague, rayless heart of the sea of mist--nought save the mystic symbol
of God's love to man soars into the unclouded blue of the infinite sky!

After frequent defeats, after the loss of all hope, the hero, wishing to
embrace for the last time his sick and blind son, sends for the
precocious boy, whose death-hour is to strike before his own. I doubt if
the scene which then occurs has, in the whole range of fiction and
poetry, ever been surpassed. This poor boy, the son of an insane mother
and a poet-father, is gifted with supernatural faculties, endowed with
second or spiritual sight. Entirely blind, and consequently surrounded
by perpetual darkness, it mattered not to him if the light of day or the
gloom of midnight was upon the earth; and in his rayless wanderings he
had made his way into the dungeons, sepulchres, and vaults, which were
lying far below the foundations of the castle, and which had for
centuries served as places of torture, punishment, and death to the
enemies of his long and noble line. In these secret charnel houses were
buried the bodies of the oppressed, while in the haughty tombs around
and above them lay the bones of their oppressors. The unfortunate and
fragile boy, the last sole scion of a long line of ancestry, had there
met the thronging and complaining ghosts of p