the poverty of
the town, the thinness of the population, and the dreary grandeur of the
ruins that overhung the capital of the perished race of the bold Counts
of Spanheim.

They passed the night at Trarbach, and continued their journey next
day. At Treves, Gertrude was for some days seriously ill; and when they
returned to Coblentz, her disease had evidently received a rapid and
alarming increase.

CHAPTER XXII. THE DOUBLE LIFE.--TREVYLYAN'S FATE.--SORROW THE PARENT OF
FAME.--NIEDERLAHNSTEIN.--DREAMS.

THERE are two lives to each of us, gliding on at the same time, scarcely
connected with each other,--the life of our actions, the life of our
minds; the external and the inward history; the movements of the frame,
the deep and ever-restless workings of the heart! They who have loved
know that there is a diary of the affections, which we might keep for
years without having occasion even to touch upon the exterior surface
of life, our busy occupations, the mechanical progress of our existence;
yet by the last are we judged, the first is never known. History reveals
men's deeds, men's outward character, but _not themselves_. There is a
secret self that hath its own life "rounded by a dream," unpenetrated,
unguessed. What passed within Trevylyan, hour after hour, as he watched
over the declining health of the only being in the world whom his proud
heart had been ever destined to love? His real record of the time
was marked by every cloud upon Gertrude's brow, every smile of her
countenance, every--the faintest--alteration in her disease; yet, to the
outward seeming, all this vast current of varying eventful emotion
lay dark and unconjectured. He filled up with wonted regularity the
colourings of existence, and smiled and moved as other men. For still,
in the heroism with which devotion conquers self, he sought only to
cheer and gladden the young heart on which he had embarked his all; and
he kept the dark tempest of his anguish for the solitude of night.

That was a peculiar doom which Fate had reserved for him; and casting
him, in after years, on the great sea of public strife, it seemed as if
she were resolved to tear from his heart all yearnings for the land.
For him there was to be no green or sequestered spot in the valley of
household peace. His bark was to know no haven, and his soul not even
the desire of rest. For action is that Lethe in which alone we forget
our former dreams, and the mind that, too stern n