then, that
tower of strength, that shield and buckler, that made me this thing you
see. Tarpeia was enough. Away with your generalities! Go, go, you slave
of the past!

Yet no,--you have not gone? You believe what you say,--I know with those
eyes you cannot deceive. Ah, but I trusted her eyes once! Yet it gives
you rest;--your sorrows are not like mine,--there is no rest for me. I
cannot go and gather that balm of Gilead,--I have no legs. I have as
good as none. This wheel-chair and that dog of a turnkey are not the
equipage for such a journey.--Ah, do not turn from me now! My railing is
worse than my cursing, you feel indeed. Well, stay with me at least, and
if it is twelve years since you shrived me at first, perhaps you shall
shrive me at last,--for I doubt if I am ever brought out to this
sunshine again, if I do not die in the prison-damps to-night,--and you,
with all your change, are Father Anshmo, I think.--Stay, I will confess
to you, confess this. Man! man! this infinite pity of your soul for mine
throws a light on my dark ways; God's curse has fallen on me through
man's curse, why not God's love through man's love? Anselmo, though you
became priest, and I went to become hero, we were children together; I
was dear to you then; I am so still, it seems. In your love let me find
the love of that Heaven I have defied.--Stay, friend, yet another word.
If man's love can be so great, what can God's love be? That which I
said I said, in desperation; in very truth, that peace hangs like an
unattainable city in the clouds before my soul's vision, that love like
a broad river flowing through the lands, an atmosphere bathing the
worlds, the subtile essence and ether of space in which the farthest
star pursues its course,--why, then, should it escape me, the mote? Oh,
when the world turned from me, I sought to flee thither! I sighed for
the rest there! Wretched, alone, I have wept in the dark and in the
light that I might go and fling myself at the heavenly feet. But, do you
see? sin has broken down the bridge between God and me. Yet why,
then, is sin in the world,--that scum that rises in the creation and
fermentation of good,--why, but _as_ a bridge on which to re-seek those
shores from which we wander? Man, I do repent me,--in loving you I
find God. And you call that blasphemy!--Nay, go, indeed, my friend! So
humble, you are not the man for me. I can talk to the winds: they, at
least, do not visit me too roughly.

These