to his laboratory
with a prodigious fragment of granite, which he ground to powder,
dissolved in acids, melted in the crucible, and burned with the
blow-pipe, and published the result of his experiments in one of the
heaviest folios of the day. And, for all these purposes, the gem itself
could not have answered better than the granite. The poet, by a somewhat
similar mistake, made prize of a great piece of ice, which he found in
a sunless chasm of the mountains, and swore that it corresponded, in all
points, with his idea of the Great Carbuncle. The critics say, that, if
his poetry lacked the splendor of the gem, it retained all the coldness
of the ice. The Lord de Vere went back to his ancestral hall, where
he contented himself with a wax-lighted chandelier, and filled, in due
course of time, another coffin in the ancestral vault. As the funeral
torches gleamed within that dark receptacle, there was no need of the
Great Carbuncle to show the vanity of earthly pomp.

The Cynic, having cast aside his spectacles, wandered about the world,
a miserable object, and was punished with an agonizing desire of light,
for the wilful blindness of his former life. The whole night long, he
would lift his splendor-blasted orbs to the moon and stars; he turned
his face eastward, at sunrise, as duly as a Persian idolater; he made
a pilgrimage to Rome, to witness the magnificent illumination of St.
Peter's Church; and finally perished in the great fire of London, into
the midst of which he had thrust himself, with the desperate idea of
catching one feeble ray from the blaze that was kindling earth and
heaven.

Matthew and his bride spent many peaceful years, and were fond of
telling the legend of the Great Carbuncle. The tale, however, towards
the close of their lengthened lives, did not meet with the full credence
that had been accorded to it by those who remembered the ancient lustre
of the gem. For it is affirmed that, from the hour when two mortals had
shown themselves so simply wise as to reject a jewel which would have
dimmed all earthly things, its splendor waned. When other pilgrims
reached the cliff, they found only an opaque stone, with particles of
mica glittering on its surface. There is also a tradition that, as the
youthful pair departed, the gem was loosened from the forehead of the
cliff, and fell into the enchanted lake, and that, at noontide, the
Seeker's form may still be seen to bend over its quenchless gleam.

So