iads of ghostly lanterns shedding their colorless rays upon
an awful, echoless solitude He would never find her here The dead of
ages were about him--the troubled spirits who had approached the pale,
stern gates of the Hereafter with rapture, and found within their
portals not rest, but a ceaseless, weary, purposeless wandering, the
world tired souls of aged men pursuing their never-ending quest in
meek, faltering wonder, and longing for the goal which surely they
must reach at last, the white, unquestioning souls of children
floating like heavenly strains of unheard music in the void immensity,
but one and all invisible imponderable. They were there, the monarchs
of buried centuries and the thousands who had knelt at their thrones,
the high and the low, the outcast and the shrived, but each as alone
as if the solitary inhabitant of all Space And _he_, who would have
fled from his fellow-men on earth, must long in vain for the sound of
human voice or the rapture of human touch He must go on--on--in these
colorless, shadowless, haunted plains, until the last trumpet-blast
should awaken the echoes of the Universe and summon him to confront
his Maker and be judged Oh! if but once more he could see the earth he
had scorned! Was it spinning on its way still, that dark, tiny ball?
How long since he had given that last glance of farewell? It must
be years and years and years, as reckoned by the time of men, for in
Eternity there is no time. And Sioned--where was she? Desolate and
abandoned, shrieked at by sudden winds, flying terrified and helpless
over level, horizonless plains only to fling herself upon the grey
waves of Death's noiseless ocean? Oh, if he could but find her and
make her forget! Together, what would matter death and silence and
everlasting unrest? All would be forgot, all but the exquisite pain of
the regret for the years he had wasted on earth, and for the solitary
heritage he had left the world. Those children of his brain! They were
with him still. Would that he had left them below to sing his name
down through the ages! They were a torment to him here, in their
futility and inaction. They could not sing to these shapeless ghosts
about him; their voices would be unheeded music; nor would any strain
sweep downward to that world whose tears he might have drawn, whose
mirth provoked, whose passions played upon at his will. The one grand
thing he had done must alone speak for him. There was in it neither
pathos