espeare, Bertie dear?" I
asked, playfully.

"As one having authority, a head and shoulders above him and all his
prating, just as you would talk to your every-day next neighbor, read
him without any fear of his old deer-stealing ghost? Why, Miriam, he
knew himself better than we knew him. He had no more idea of being a
genius than you have! He was a sort of artesian well of a man, and could
not help spouting platitudes, that was all. Besides, he had eyes to see
and ears to hear, and a very Yankee spirit of investigation. It is the
fashion to crack him up like the Bible, both encyclopaedias, that's all!
Every man can see himself in these books, and every man likes a
looking-glass, and that's the whole secret of their success."

"Bertie, you are incorrigible."

"No, I am not; only genuine. I do think there is a good deal in both of
the works in question, but their sublimity I dispute. They are homely,
coarse, commonplace, as birth and death."

There was something that almost froze my blood in the way she said those
last words, lying back upon the sofa with far-off-looking eyes and hands
clasped beneath her head.

"Miriam," she said, after a while, "life is a humbug. I have thought so
for some time."

"Poor child, poor child!"

"Ay, poorer than the poorest, Miriam Harz," and, laying aside my work, I
went to and knelt beside her, and kissed her brow.

"I have no soul to open! I am as empty as a chrysalis-case, that the
butterfly has gone out of to dwell amid sunshine and flowers. Yet I
believe I had one once"--in ineffably mournful accents--"but two men
killed it; and yet, neither intended the blow! O Miriam! I understand at
last what Coleridge meant by his "life in death." There is such a
thing--and that great necromancer found it out! I am the breathing
impersonation of that loathly thing, I believe. Listen"--and she sat up
with one raised finger and gave the poet's words with rare expression:

"'The nightmare--life in death was she,
That chilled men's blood with cold.'

"Doesn't that describe me as I am, Miriam?"

"You are, indeed, much changed, Bertie; perhaps it would be well could
you confide in me."

"No, it would not be well! I never could keep any thing wholly to
myself, neither can I tell it wholly, even to such as you--reticent!
merciful! But this believe, I have done nothing wrong, nothing to be
ashamed of, to wear sackcloth and ashes for, and I am preparing to put
my foot on it all. Ay,