at unless the Gods should be
appeased duly, the end of Rome and her empire was at hand.

And now--what though for ten whole days consecutive the sacred games went
on; what though nothing had been omitted whereby to avert the immortal
indignation--did not this heaven-born tempest prove that the wrath was not
soothed, that the decree yet stood firm?

In such deep thoughts, and in the strong excitement of such expectation,
Hortensia and her daughter had passed that awful night; not without high
instructions from the elder lady, grave and yet stirring narratives of the
great men of old--how they strove fiercely, energetically, while strife
could avail anything; and how, when the last hope was over, they folded
their hands in stern and awful resignation, and met their fate
unblenching, and with but one care--that the decorum of their deaths should
not prove unworthy the dignity of their past lives.

Not without generous and noble resolutions on the part of both, that they
too would not be found wanting.

But there was nothing humble, nothing soft, in their stern and proud
submission to the inevitable necessity. Nothing of love toward the hand
which dealt the blow--nothing of confidence in supernal justice, much less
in supernal mercy! Nothing of that sweet hope, that undying trust, that
consciousness of self-unworthiness, that full conviction of a glorious
future, which renders so beautiful and happy the submission of a dying
Christian.

No! there were none of these things; for to the wisest and best of the
ancients, the foreshadowings of the soul's immortality were dim, faint,
and uncertain. The legends of their mythology held up such pictures of the
sensuality and vice of those whom they called Gods, that it was utterly
impossible for any sound understanding to accept them. And deep thinkers
were consequently driven into pure Deism, coupled too often with the
Epicurean creed, that the Great Spirit was too grand and too sublime to
trouble himself with the brief doings of mortality.

The whole scope of the Roman's hope and ambition, then, was limited to
this world; or, if there was a longing for anything beyond the term of
mortality, it was for a name, a memory, an immortality of good report.

And pride, which the christian, better instructed, knows to be the germ
and root of all sin, was to the Roman, the sole spring of honourable
action, the sole source of virtue.

Now, with the morning, quiet was restored both to