ve, or any hell below.
The world has stood still and there is no life in the thick, black
stillness. Death himself is dead, and one living man is forgotten
behind, to mourn him as a lost friend, to pray that some new destroyer,
more sure of hand than death himself, may come striding through the
awful silence to make an end at last of the tormented spirit, to bear it
swiftly to the place where that last star ceased to shine, and to let it
down into the restful depths of an unremembering eternity. But into
that place, which is the soul of man, no destroyer can penetrate; that
solitary life neither the sword, nor pestilence, nor age, nor eternity
can extinguish; that immortal memory no night can obscure. There was a
beginning indeed, but end there can be none.

Such a man was the Wanderer, as he paced the deserted street in the
cruel, gloomy cold of the late day. Between his sight and the star of
his own hope an impenetrable shadow had arisen, so that he saw it no
more. The memory of Beatrice was more than ever distinct to his inner
sense, but the sudden presentiment of her death, real in its working as
any certainty, had taken the reality of her from the ground on which he
stood. For that one link had still been between them. Somewhere, near
or far, during all these years, she, too, had trodden the earth with
her light footsteps, the same universal mother earth on which they both
moved and lived. The very world was hers, since she was touching it,
and to touch it in his turn was to feel her presence. For who could
tell what hidden currents ran in the secret depths, or what mysterious
interchange of sympathy might not be maintained through them? The air
itself was hers, since she was somewhere breathing it; the stars, for
she looked on them; the sun, for it warmed her; the cold of winter,
for it chilled her too; the breezes of spring, for they fanned her pale
cheek and cooled her dark brow. All had been hers, and at the thought
that she had passed away, a cry of universal mourning broke from the
world she had left behind, and darkness descended upon all things, as a
funeral pall.

Cold and dim and sad the ancient city had seemed before, but it was a
thousandfold more melancholy now, more black, more saturated with the
gloom of ages. From time to time the Wanderer raised his heavy lids,
scarcely seeing what was before him, conscious of nothing but the horror
which had so suddenly embraced his whole existence. Then, all at