ate
the surrounding gloom. His hands were manacled, his legs also were
loaded with chains. The notion that his life might perhaps have been
cruelly spared in order that he might linger on in this horrible state
of conscious annihilation filled him with frenzy. He would have dashed
his fetters against his brow, but the chain restrained him. He flung
himself upon the damp and rugged ground. His fall disturbed a thousand
obscene things. He heard the quick glide of a serpent, the creeping
retreat of the clustering scorpions, and the swift escape of the dashing
rats. His mighty calamities seemed slight when compared with these petty
miseries. His great soul could not support him under these noisome and
degrading incidents. He sprang, in disgust, upon his feet, and stood
fearful of moving, lest every step should introduce him to some new
abomination. At length, exhausted nature was unable any longer to
sustain him. He groped his way to the rude seat, cut in the rocky wall,
which was his only accommodation. He put forth his hand. It touched the
slimy fur of some wild animal, that instantly sprang away, its
fiery eyes sparkling in the dark. Alroy recoiled with a sensation of
woe-begone dismay. His shaken nerves could not sustain him under this
base danger, and these foul and novel trials. He could not refrain from
an exclamation of despair; and, when he remembered that he was now far
beyond the reach of all human solace and sympathy, even all human aid,
for a moment his mind seemed to desert him; and he wrung his hands in
forlorn and almost idiotic woe. An awful thing it is, the failure of
the energies of a master-mind. He who places implicit confidence in his
genius will find himself some day utterly defeated and deserted. 'Tis
bitter! Every paltry hind seems but to breathe to mock you. Slow,
indeed, is such a mind to credit that the never-failing resource can at
least be wanting. But so it is. Like a dried-up fountain, the perennial
flow and bright fertility have ceased, and ceased for ever. Then comes
the madness of retrospection.

Draw a curtain! draw a curtain! and fling it over this agonising
anatomy.

The days of childhood, his sweet sister's voice and smiling love, their
innocent pastimes, and the kind solicitude of faithful servants, all the
soft detail of mild domestic life: these were the sights and memories
that flitted in wild play before the burning vision of Alroy, and
rose upon his tortured mind. Empire and gl