red virtues" begin

"To walk as ghosts
Within the shuddering soul and shriek remorse."

The past returns on him with tyrannous power,--early associations, the
taking up of his knightly vows with all its grand religious and heroic
accompaniments, the delegated and accepted trust which he has by
forsaking betrayed--

"The life that made
His full-formed self, as the impregnant sap
Of years successive frames the full-branched tree"--

all come back with stern reproach and denunciation of the apostate who,
in hope of the outward realisation of a human love, has cast off and
forsworn them all. Fiercely he fronts and strives to silence the
accusing throng. Still the same plea--

"My sin was made for me
By men's perverseness:"

still the same impulses of mad, despairing self-assertion--

"I have a _right_ to choose my good or ill,
A right to damn myself!"--

still the same vain imagination that union is any longer possible between
Fedalma's high self-abnegating truth and his self-seeking abnegation of
all truth, coupled with the arrogant assumption that he, morally so weak
and fallen, can sustain her steadfast and heroic strength--"I with my
love will be her providence."

When with the fearful Gypsy chant and curse

"The newer oath
Thrusts its loud presence on him,"

we feel that any madness of act the wild conflict within may dictate has
become possible; and we follow to that presence of Fedalma which is now
the only goal life has left to him, prepared for such outbreak of despair
as shall be commensurate with a life called to such nobleness of deed and
fallen to such a depth of ruin. We see the trust he has deserted in the
hands of the foe against whom he had accepted commission to guard it; his
friends slaughtered at the post he had forsaken; himself as the sworn
Zincalo in alliance with the enemy and slaughterer, and associated with
the havoc they have wrought. The "right to damn" himself which he had
claimed is his in all its bitterness; and when he would charge the self
damnation upon the Gypsy chief, the reply of calm withering scorn can but
add keener pang to his awaking remorse: the self-damning

"Deed was done
Before you took your oath, or reached our camp,
Done when you slipped in secret from the post
'Twas yours to keep, and not to meditate
If others might not fill it."

The climax of his revulsion, remorse, and