ilderness which must be still trodden in solitude, with bleeding
feet, with sobs for help, as it was trodden by them of old time.

My mind speculated eagerly on the means by which I should become my
brother's successful rival, for I was still too timid, in my ignorance of
Bertha's actual feeling, to venture on any step that would urge from her
an avowal of it. I thought I should gain confidence even for this, if my
vision of Prague proved to have been veracious; and yet, the horror of
that certitude! Behind the slim girl Bertha, whose words and looks I
watched for, whose touch was bliss, there stood continually that Bertha
with the fuller form, the harder eyes, the more rigid mouth--with the
barren, selfish soul laid bare; no longer a fascinating secret, but a
measured fact, urging itself perpetually on my unwilling sight. Are you
unable to give me your sympathy--you who react this? Are you unable to
imagine this double consciousness at work within me, flowing on like two
parallel streams which never mingle their waters and blend into a common
hue? Yet you must have known something of the presentiments that spring
from an insight at war with passion; and my visions were only like
presentiments intensified to horror. You have known the powerlessness of
ideas before the might of impulse; and my visions, when once they had
passed into memory, were mere ideas--pale shadows that beckoned in vain,
while my hand was grasped by the living and the loved.

In after-days I thought with bitter regret that if I had foreseen
something more or something different--if instead of that hideous vision
which poisoned the passion it could not destroy, or if even along with it
I could have had a foreshadowing of that moment when I looked on my
brother's face for the last time, some softening influence would have
been shed over my feeling towards him: pride and hatred would surely have
been subdued into pity, and the record of those hidden sins would have
been shortened. But this is one of the vain thoughts with which we men
flatter ourselves. We try to believe that the egoism within us would
have easily been melted, and that it was only the narrowness of our
knowledge which hemmed in our generosity, our awe, our human piety, and
hindered them from submerging our hard indifference to the sensations and
emotions of our fellows. Our tenderness and self-renunciation seem
strong when our egoism has had its day--when, after our mean strivi