which
lay in shadow on its banks, scattered at capricious intervals a pale but
unpiercing wanness rather than lustre along the tide, or save where the
stillness was occasionally broken by the faint oar of the boatman or the
call of his rude voice, mellowed almost into music by distance and the
element.

But behind them, as they leaned, the feet of passengers on the great
thoroughfare passed not oft,--but quick; and that sound, the commonest
of earth's, made rarer and rarer by the advancing night, contrasted
rather than destroyed the quiet of the heaven and the solemnity of the
silent stars.

"It is an old but a just comparison," said Mordaunt's companion, "which
has likened life to a river such as we now survey, gliding alternately
in light or in darkness, in sunshine or in storm, to that great ocean in
which all waters meet."

"If," said Algernon, with his usual thoughtful and pensive smile, "we
may be allowed to vary that simile, I would, separating the universal
and eternal course of Destiny from the fleeting generations of human
life, compare the river before us to that course, and not it, but the
city scattered on its banks, to the varieties and mutability of life.
There (in the latter) crowded together in the great chaos of social
union, we herd in the night of ages, flinging the little lustre of
our dim lights over the sullen tide which rolls beside us,--seeing the
tremulous ray glitter on the surface, only to show us how profound is
the gloom which it cannot break, and the depths which it is too faint
to pierce. There Crime stalks, and Woe hushes her moan, and Poverty
couches, and Wealth riots,--and Death, in all and each, is at his silent
work. But the stream of Fate, unconscious of our changes and decay,
glides on to its engulfing bourne; and, while it mirrors the faintest
smile or the lightest frown of heaven, beholds, without a change upon
its surface, the generations of earth perish, and be renewed, along its
banks!"

There was a pause; and by an involuntary and natural impulse, they
turned from the waves beneath to the heaven which, in its breathing
contrast, spread all eloquently, yet hushed, above. They looked upon
the living and intense stars, and felt palpably at their hearts that
spell--wild, but mute--which nothing on or of earth can inspire; that
pining of the imprisoned soul, that longing after the immortality on
high, which is perhaps no imaginary type of the immortality ourselves
are heirs