now, when
he shut out the dismal street from view, and went to the sanctuary and
kneeled upon the threshold, he saw but a dim vision, as of something
lying upon an altar in the dark, something shrouded in white, something
shapely and yet shapeless, something that had been and was not any more.

He reached the end of the street, but he felt a reluctance to leave
it, and turned back again, walking still more slowly and heavily than
before. So far as any outward object or circumstance could be said to be
in harmony with his mood, the dismal lane, the failing light, the bitter
air, were at that moment sympathetic to him. The tomb itself is not more
sepulchral than certain streets and places in Prague on a dark
winter's afternoon. In the certainty that the last and the greatest of
misfortunes had befallen him, the Wanderer turned back into the gloomy
by-way as the pale, wreathing ghosts, fearful of the sharp daylight
and the distant voices of men, sink back at dawn into the graves out
of which they have slowly risen to the outer air in the silence of the
night.

Death, the arch-steward of eternity, walks the bounds of man's entailed
estate, and the headstones of men's graves are landmarks in the great
possession committed to his stewardship, enclosing within their narrow
ring the wretched plot of land which makes up all of life's inheritance.
From ever to always the generations of men do bondsmen's service in that
single field, to plough it and sow it, and harrow it and water it, to
lay the sickle to the ripe corn if so be that their serfdom falls in the
years of plenty and the ear is full, to eat the bread of tears, if
their season of servitude be required of them in a time of scarcity and
famine. Bondsmen of death, from birth, they are sent forth out of the
sublime silence of the pathless forest which hems in the open glebe
land of the present and which is eternity, past and to come; bondsmen
of death, from youth to age, they join in the labour of the field,
they plough, they sow, they reap, perhaps, tears they shed many, and of
laughter there is also a little amongst them; bondsmen of death, to the
last, they are taken in the end, when they have served their tale of
years, many or few, and they are led from furrow and grass land, willing
or unwilling, mercifully or cruelly, to the uttermost boundary, and they
are thrust out quickly into the darkness whence they came. For their
place is already filled, and the new husban