es between the dark billows would gape yet wider
and show the blasting secrets of some world of fiery despair below. He
fancied that he heard behind and around the mocking laugh of fiends, and
that confused clamor of mingled shrieks and lamentations which Dante
describes as filling the dusky approaches to that forlorn realm where hope
never enters.

"Ah, God," he exclaimed, "for this vain life of man! They eat, they drink,
they dance, they sing, they marry and are given in marriage, they have
castles and gardens and villas, and the very beauty of Paradise seems over
it all,--and yet how close by burns and roars the eternal fire! Fools that
we are, to clamor for indulgence and happiness in this life, when the
question is, to escape everlasting burnings! If I tremble at this outer
court of God's wrath and justice, what must be the fires of hell? These
are but earthly fires; they can but burn the body: those are made to burn
the soul; they are undying as the soul is. What would it be to be dragged
down, down, down, into an abyss of soul-fire hotter than this for ages on
ages? This might bring merciful death in time: that will have no end."

The monk fell on his knees and breathed out piercing supplications. Every
nerve and fibre within him seemed tense with his agony of prayer. It was
not the outcry for purity and peace, not a tender longing for forgiveness,
not a filial remorse for sin, but the nervous anguish of him who shrieks
in the immediate apprehension of an unendurable torture. It was the cry of
a man upon the rack, the despairing scream of him who feels himself
sinking in a burning dwelling. Such anguish has found an utterance in
Stradella's celebrated "Pieta, Signore," which still tells to our ears, in
its wild moans and piteous shrieks, the religious conceptions of his day;
for there is no phase of the Italian mind that has not found expression in
its music.

When the oppression of the heat and sulphurous vapor became too dreadful
to be borne, the monk retraced his way and climbed with difficulty up the
steep sides of the crater, till he gained the summit above, where a
comparatively free air revived him. All night he wandered up and down in
that dreary vicinity, now listening to the mournful roar and crackle of
the fire, and now raising his voice in penitential psalms or the notes of
that terrific "Dies Irae" which sums up all the intense fear and horror
with which the religion of the Middle Ages clothed the i