of a
bronzed, black colour, then red again, and then changes instantaneously
into a liquid, furnace-like, molten metal. Then that lake of fire
rises--rises--rises towards the sky like an immense whirlpool. There is
now a fiery horizon like iron at a white heat. This immense, boundless
horizon dazzles and scorches the very eyes of the Schoolmaster, who,
fascinated, fastened to the spot, cannot turn away his gaze. Then, at
the bottom of this burning lava, whose reflection seems to consume him,
he sees pass and repass, one by one, the black and giant spectres of his
victims.

"The magic-lanthorn of remorse! remorse! remorse!" shrieks the
night-bird, flapping her hideous wings, and laughing mockingly.

Notwithstanding the intolerable anguish which his impatient gaze
creates, the Schoolmaster has his eyes fixed on the grisly phantoms
which move in the blazing sheet. Then an indefinable horror steals over
him. Passing through every step of indescribable torture, by dint of
contemplating this blazing sight, he feels his eyeballs--which have
replaced the blood with which his orbits were filled at the commencement
of his dream--he feels his eyeballs grow hot, burning, and melt in this
furnace--to smoke and bubble--and at last to become calcined in their
cavities like two crucibles filled with red fire. By a fearful power,
after having seen as well as felt the successive transformations of his
eyeballs into ashes, he falls into the darkness of his actual blindness.

But now, suddenly, his intolerable agonies are assuaged as though by
enchantment. An odorous air of delicious freshness passes over his
burning eyeballs. This air is a lovely admixture of the scents of
springtime, which exhale from flowers bathed in evening dew. The
Schoolmaster hears all about him a gentle murmur, like that of the
breeze which just stirs the leaves--like that of a brook of running
waters, which rushes and murmurs on its bed of stone and moss "in the
leafy month of June." Thousands of birds warble the most enchanting
melodies. They are stilled, and the voices of children, of angelic tone,
sing strange, unknown words--words that are "winged" (if we may use the
expression), and which the Schoolmaster hears mount to heaven with
gentle motion. A feeling of moral health, of tranquillity, of undefined
languor, creeps over him by degrees. It is an expansion of the heart, an
elevation of the mind, an effort of the soul, of which no physical
feeling, how de