he entered the gates of Paradise not less
innocent; and, again, as if she could not enter; and some blame--but I
knew not what blame--was mine; and now she looked as though broken with
a woe that no man could read, as she sought to travel back to her early
joy--yet no longer a joy that is sublime in innocency, but a joy from
which sprung abysses of memories polluted into anguish, till her tears
seemed to be suffused with drops of blood. All around was peace and the
deep silence of untroubled solitude; only in the lovely lady was a sign
of horror, that had slept, under deep ages of frost, in her heart, and
now rose, as with the rushing of wings, to her face. Could it be
supposed that one life--so pitiful a thing--was what moved her care? Oh
no; it was, or it seemed, as if this poor wreck of a life happened to be
that one which determined the fate of some thousand others. Nothing
less; nothing so abject as one poor fifty years--nothing less than a
century of centuries could have stirred the horror that rose to her
lovely lips, as once more she waved me away from the cottage.

Oh, reader, five years after I saw that sweet face in reality--saw it in
the flesh; saw that pomp of womanhood; saw that cottage; saw a thousand
times that lovely domicile that heard the cooing of the solitary dove in
the solitary morning; saw the grace of childhood and the shadows of
graves that lay, like creatures asleep, in the sunshine; saw, also, the
horror, somehow realized as a shadowy reflection from myself, which
warned me off from that cottage, and which still rings through the
dreams of five-and-twenty years.

The general sentiment or sense of pre-existence, of which this
_Suspiria_ may be regarded as one significant and affecting
illustration, had this record in the outset of the 'Reminiscences of
Wordsworth':

'Oh, sense of mysterious pre-existence, by which, through years, in
which as yet a stranger to those valleys of Westmoreland, I viewed
myself as a phantom self--a second identity projected from my own
consciousness, and already living amongst them--how was it, and by what
prophetic instinct, that already I said to myself oftentimes, when
chasing day-dreams along the pictures of these wild mountainous
labyrinths, which as yet I had not traversed, "Here, in some distant
year, I shall be shaken with love, and there with stormiest grief and
regret"? Whence was it that sudden revelations came upon me, like the
drawings up of a curt