ch, to calm the delicate scruples of the
lady abbess of the convent. More than a century afterward they were
again united in the same tomb; and when at length the Paraclete was
destroyed, their moldering remains were transported to the church of
Nogent-sur-Seine. They were next deposited in an ancient cloister at
Paris, and now repose near the gateway of the cemetery of Pere
Lachaise. What a singular destiny was theirs! that, after a life of
such passionate and disastrous love--such sorrows, and tears, and
penitence--their very dust should not be suffered to rest quietly in
the grave!--that their death should so much resemble their life in its
changes and vicissitudes, its partings and its meetings, its
inquietudes and its persecutions!--that mistaken zeal should follow
them down to the very tomb--as if earthly passion could glimmer, like
a funeral lamp, amid the damps of the charnel house, and "even in
their ashes burn their wonted fires"!

As I gazed on the sculptured forms before me, and the little chapel
whose Gothic roof seemed to protect their marble sleep, my busy memory
swung back the dark portals of the past, and the picture of their sad
and eventful lives came up before me in the gloomy distance. What a
lesson for those who are endowed with the fatal gift of genius! It
would seem, indeed, that He who "tempers the wind to the shorn lamb"
tempers also His chastisements to the errors and infirmities of a
weak and simple mind--while the transgressions of him upon whose
nature are more strongly marked the intellectual attributes of the
Deity are followed, even upon earth, by severer tokens of the Divine
displeasure. He who sins in the darkness of a benighted intellect sees
not so clearly, through the shadows that surround him, the countenance
of an offended God; but he who sins in the broad noonday of a clear
and radiant mind, when at length the delirium of sensual passion has
subsided and the cloud flits away from before the sun, trembles
beneath the searching eye of that accusing Power which is strong in
the strength of a godlike intellect. Thus the mind and the heart are
closely linked together, and the errors of genius bear with them their
own chastisement, even upon earth. The history of Abelard and Heloise
is an illustration of this truth. But at length they sleep well. Their
lives are like a tale that is told; their errors are "folded up like a
book"; and what mortal hand shall break the seal that death has