ds that lay ahead. Faster and faster she ran; round a
promontory of rocks she wheeled out of sight; in an instant I also wheeled
round it, but only to see the treacherous sands gathering above her head.
Already her person was buried; only the fair young head and the diadem of
white roses around it were still visible to the pitying heavens; and, last
of all, was visible one marble arm. I saw by the early twilight this fair
young head, as it was sinking down to darkness--saw this marble arm, as it
rose above her head and her treacherous grave, tossing, faultering,
rising, clutching as at some false deceiving hand stretched out from the
clouds--saw this marble arm uttering her dying hope, and then her dying
despair. The head, the diadem, the arm,--these all had sunk; at last over
these also the cruel quicksand had closed; and no memorial of the fair
young girl remained on earth, except my own solitary tears, and the funeral
bells from the desert seas, that, rising again more softly, sang a requiem
over the grave of the buried child, and over her blighted dawn.

I sate, and wept in secret the tears that men have ever given to the memory
of those that died before the dawn, and by the treachery of earth, our
mother. But the tears and funeral bells were hushed suddenly by a shout
as of many nations, and by a roar as from some great king's artillery
advancing rapidly along the valleys, and heard afar by its echoes among
the mountains. "Hush!" I said, as I bent my ear earthwards to
listen--"hush!--this either is the very anarchy of strife, or else"--and
then I listened more profoundly, and said as I raised my head--"or else, oh
heavens! it is _victory_ that swallows up all strife."

4.

Immediately, in trance, I was carried over land and sea to some distant
kingdom, and placed upon a triumphal car, amongst companions crowned with
laurel. The darkness of gathering midnight, brooding over all the land, hid
from us the mighty crowds that were weaving restlessly about our carriage
as a centre--we heard them, but we saw them not. Tidings had arrived,
within an hour, of a grandeur that measured itself against centuries; too
full of pathos they were, too full of joy that acknowledged no fountain
but God, to utter themselves by other language than by tears, by restles
anthems, by reverberations rising from every choir, of the _Gloria in
excelsis_. These tidings we that sate upon the laurelled car had it for our
privilege to publish a