re looms a scaffold,--thick steams of blood rise as from a shambles.
What is more strange to me, a creature here, a very type of the false
ideal of common men,--body and mind, a hideous mockery of the art that
shapes the Beautiful, and the desires that seek the Perfect, ever haunts
my vision amidst these perturbed and broken clouds of the fate to be.
By that shadowy scaffold it stands and gibbers at me, with lips dropping
slime and gore. Come, O friend of the far-time; for me, at least, thy
wisdom has not purged away thy human affections. According to the bonds
of our solemn order, reduced now to thee and myself, lone survivors of
so many haughty and glorious aspirants, thou art pledged, too, to warn
the descendant of those whom thy counsels sought to initiate into the
great secret in a former age. The last of that bold Visconti who was
once thy pupil is the relentless persecutor of this fair child. With
thoughts of lust and murder, he is digging his own grave; thou mayest
yet daunt him from his doom. And I also mysteriously, by the same bond,
am pledged to obey, if he so command, a less guilty descendant of a
baffled but nobler student. If he reject my counsel, and insist upon
the pledge, Mejnour, thou wilt have another neophyte. Beware of another
victim! Come to me! This will reach thee with all speed. Answer it by
the pressure of one hand that I can dare to clasp!

CHAPTER 3.VIII.

Il lupo
Ferito, credo, mi conobbe e 'ncontro
Mi venne con la bocca sanguinosa.
"Aminta," At. iv. Sc. i.

(The wounded wolf, I think, knew me, and came to meet me with its
bloody mouth.)

At Naples, the tomb of Virgil, beetling over the cave of Posilipo, is
reverenced, not with the feelings that should hallow the memory of the
poet, but the awe that wraps the memory of the magician. To his charms
they ascribe the hollowing of that mountain passage; and tradition yet
guards his tomb by the spirits he had raised to construct the cavern.
This spot, in the immediate vicinity of Viola's home, had often
attracted her solitary footsteps. She had loved the dim and solemn
fancies that beset her as she looked into the lengthened gloom of the
grotto, or, ascending to the tomb, gazed from the rock on the dwarfed
figures of the busy crowd that seemed to creep like insects along the
windings of the soil below; and now, at noon, she bent thither her
thoughtful way. She threaded the narrow path, she passed the gloomy