e,
sublime.

And thus passed ages and ages, aeons and aeons. The great earth there in
the dim distance above the ocean has toiled wearily about the sun, until
its mechanism was failing, and the warm ardor of the lover's eye was
becoming pale and cold from age, while the air all about the fast
dwindling sphere was heavy and thick with the sorrows and heartaches and
woes of the humans upon its face. Heavy with the screams and roar of
war; with the curses of the deceived of traitors; with the passionate
sighs of unlawful love; with the crushing unrest of blighted hopes.
Knowledge and contempt of all these things permeated even to the inmost
depths of time, as I lay in the halls of rest and smiled at the web
floating through my white fingers.

* * * * *

But hark! discord begins. There is a vague fear which springs from an
unknown source and drifts into the depths of rest; fear, indefinable,
unaccountable, unknowable, shuddering. Pain begins, for the heart
springs into life, and fills the silence with the terror of its
beatings, thick, knifing, frightful in its intense longing. Power of
mind over soul, power of calm over fear avail nothing; suspense and
misery, locked arm in arm, pervade aeonic stillness, till all things else
become subordinate, unnoticed.

Centuries drift away, and the giddy, old reprobate--earth, dying a
hideous, ghastly death, with but one solitary human to shudder in unison
with its last throes, to bask in the last pale rays of a cold sun, to
inhale the last breath of a metallic atmosphere; totters, reels, falls
into space, and is no more. Peal out, ye brazen bells, peal out the
requiem of the sinner! Roll your mournful tones into the ears of the
saddened angels, weeping with wing-covered eyes! Toll the requiem of the
sinner, sinking swiftly, sobbingly into the depths of time's ocean.
Down, down, until the great groans which arose from the domes and Ionic
roofs about me told that the sad old earth sought rest in eternity,
while the universe shrugged its shoulders over the loss of another star.

And now, the great invisible fear became apparent, tangible, for all the
sins, the woes, the miseries, the dreads, the dismal achings and
throbbings, the dreariness and gloom of the lost star came together and
like a huge geni took form and hideous shape--octopus-like--which slowly
approached me, erstwhile happy--and hovered about my couch in fearful
menace.

*