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ory of a fallen empire in all its epochs. "There is one singular habitant of these ruins," said the student,--"a solitary painter, who has dwelt here some twenty years, companioned only by his Art. No other apartment but that which he tenants is occupied by a human being." "What a poetical existence!" cried Gertrude, enchanted with a solitude so full of associations. "Perhaps so," said the cruel Vane, ever anxious to dispel an illusion, "but more probably custom has deadened to him all that overpowers ourselves with awe; and he may tread among these ruins rather seeking to pick up some rude morsel of antiquity, than feeding his imagination with the dim traditions that invest them with so august a poetry." "Monsieur's conjecture has something of the truth in it," said the German; "but then the painter is a Frenchman." There is a sense of fatality in the singular mournfulness and majesty which belong to the ruins of Heidelberg, contrasting the vastness of the strength with the utterness of the ruin. It has been twice struck with lightning, and is the wreck of the elements, not of man; during the great siege it sustained, the lightning is supposed to have struck the powder magazine by accident. What a scene for some great imaginative work! What a mocking interference of the wrath of nature in the puny contests of men! One stroke of "the red right arm" above us, crushing the triumph of ages, and laughing to scorn the power of the beleaguers and the valour of the besieged! They passed the whole day among these stupendous ruins, and felt, when they descended to their inn, as if they had left the caverns of some mighty tomb. CHAPTER XXX. NO PART OF THE EARTH REALLY SOLITARY.--THE SONG OF THE FAIRIES.--THE SACRED SPOT.--THE WITCH OF THE EVIL WINDS.--THE SPELL AND THE DUTY OF THE FAIRIES. BUT in what spot of the world is there ever utter solitude? The vanity of man supposes that loneliness is _his_ absence! Who shall say what millions of spiritual beings glide invisibly among scenes apparently the most deserted? Or what know we of our own mechanism, that we should deny the possibility of life and motion to things that we cannot ourselves recognize? At moonlight, in the Great Court of Heidelberg, on the borders of the shattered basin overgrown with weeds, the following song was heard by the melancholy shades that roam at night through the mouldering halls of old, and the gloomy hollows in the mountain
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