ad she indeed
become one with God and had her earnest seeking for the Divinity ended
in glorification? No; her arms which she had thrown up as if to fly,
fell by her side it was all in vain. A pain--a trifling pain in her
foot, had brought her down again to the base world of sense which she so
ardently strove to soar away from.

Several times she took up the mirror, looked in it fixedly as before,
and then gazed upwards; but each time that she lost consciousness of the
material world and that her liberated soul began to move its unfettered
pinions, some little noise, the twitch of a muscle, a fly settling on
her hand, a drop of perspiration falling from her brow on to her cheek,
roused her senses to reassert themselves.

Why--why was it so difficult to shake off this burthen of mortal clay?
She thought of herself as of a sculptor who chisels away all superfluous
material froth his block of marble, to reveal the image of the god
within; but it was easier to remove the enclosing stone than to release
the soul from the body to which it was so closely knit. Still, she did
not give up the struggle to attain the object which others had achieved
before her; but she got no nearer to it--indeed, less and less near,
for, between her and that hoped-for climax, rose up a series of memories
and strange faces which she could not get rid of. The chisel slipped
aside, went wrong or lost its edge before the image could be extracted
from the block.

One illusion after another floated before her eyes first it was Gorgo,
the idol of her old heart, lying pale and fair on a sea of surf that
rocked her on its watery waste--up high on the crest of a wave and then
deep down in the abyss that yawned behind it. She, too--so young, a
hardly-opened blossom--must perish in the universal ruin, and be crushed
by the same omnipotent hand that could overthrow the greatest of the
gods; and a glow of passionate hatred snatched her away from the aim of
her hopes. Then the dream changed she saw a scattered flock of ravens
flying in wide circles, at an unattainable height, against the clouds;
suddenly they vanished and she saw, in a grey mist, the monument to
Porphyrius' wife, Gorgo's long-departed mother. She had often visited
the mausoleum with tender emotion, but she did not want to see it
now--not now, and she shook it off; but in its place rose up the image
of her daughter-in-law herself, the dweller in that tomb, and no effort
of will or energy avai