e of
him she so idolized deepened that stillness into a more delicious and
subduing calm. Little did she dream as the boat glided over the water,
and the towers of Cologne rose in the blue air of evening, how few were
those hours that divided her from the tomb! But, in looking back to the
life of one we have loved, how dear is the thought that the latter days
were the days of light, that the cloud never chilled the beauty of the
setting sun, and that if the years of existence were brief, all that
existence has most tender, most sacred, was crowded into that space!
Nothing dark, then, or bitter, rests with our remembrance of the lost:
_we_ are the mourners, but pity is not for the mourned,--our grief is
purely selfish; when we turn to its object, the hues of happiness are
round it, and that very love which is the parent of our woe was the
consolation, the triumph, of the departed!

The majestic Rhine was calm as a lake; the splashing of the oar only
broke the stillness, and after a long pause in their conversation,
Gertrude, putting her hand on Trevylyan's arm, reminded him of a
promised story: for he too had moods of abstraction, from which, in her
turn, she loved to lure him; and his voice to her had become a sort of
want.

"Let it be," said she, "a tale suited to the hour; no fierce
tradition,--nay, no grotesque fable, but of the tenderer dye of
superstition. Let it be of love, of woman's love,--of the love that
defies the grave: for surely even after death it lives; and heaven would
scarcely be heaven if memory were banished from its blessings."

"I recollect," said Trevylyan, after a slight pause, "a short German
legend, the simplicity of which touched me much when I heard it; but,"
added he, with a slight smile, "so much more faithful appears in the
legend the love of the woman than that of the man, that _I_ at least
ought scarcely to recite it."

"Nay," said Gertrude, tenderly, "the fault of the inconstant only
heightens our gratitude to the faithful."

CHAPTER VIII. THE SOUL IN PURGATORY; OR LOVE STRONGER THAN DEATH.

THE angels strung their harps in heaven, and their music went up like
a stream of odours to the pavilions of the Most High; but the harp
of Seralim was sweeter than that of his fellows, and the Voice of
the Invisible One (for the angels themselves know not the glories of
Jehovah--only far in the depths of heaven they see one Unsleeping Eye
watching forever over Creation) was heard saying,