the world wakened, brought no change to the solitudes that men had
forgotten, and only memories of dead-deserted gods still haunted in the
places of their lost temples, whose columns were now the sea-pines'
stems, and on whose fallen altars and whose shattered sculptures the
lizard made her shelter and the wind-sown grasses seeded and took root.
Of the once graceful marble beauty and the incense-steeped stones of
sacrifice nothing remained but moss-grown shapeless fragments, buried
beneath a pall of leaves by twice a thousand autumns. Yet the ancient
sanctity still rested on the nameless, pathless woods; the breath of an
earlier time, of a younger season of the earth, seemed to lie yet upon
the untroubled forest ways; the whisper of the unseen waters had a
dream-like, unreal cadence; in the deep shade, in the warm fragrance and
the heavy gloom, there was a voluptuous yet mournful charm--the world
seemed so far, the stars shone so near; there were the sweetness of rest
and the oblivion of passion.

* * *

Death is not ours to deal. And were it ours, should we give him the
nameless mystic mercy which all men live to crave--give it as the
chastisement of crime? Death! It is rest to the aged, it is oblivion to
the atheist, it is immortality to the poet! It is a vast, dim,
exhaustless pity to all the world. And would you summon it as your
hardest cruelty to sin?

They were silent; she stirred their souls--she had not bound their
passions.

"A traitor merits death," they muttered.

"Merits it! Not so. The martyr, the liberator, the seeker of truth, may
deserve its peace; how has the traitor won them? You deem yourselves
just; your justice errs. If you would give him justice, make him live.
Live to know fear lest every wind among the leaves may whisper of his
secret; live to feel the look of a young child's eyes a shame to him;
live to envy every peasant whose bread has not been bought with tainted
coin; live to hear ever in his path the stealing step of haunting
retribution; live to see his brethren pass by him as a thing accurst;
live to listen in his age to white-haired men, who once had been his
comrades, tell to the youth about them the unforgotten story of his
shame. Make him live thus if you would have justice."

They answered nothing; a shudder ran through them as they heard.

"And--if you have as I--a deliverance that forbids you even so much
harshness, still let him live, and bury his trans