ial and
shallow as ever made the frivolity of woman a theme for the satire of
poets, had sufficed, in devastating the field of my affections, to blast
the uses for which I had cultured my mind; and had my intellect been as
great as heaven ever gave to man, it would have been as vain a shield as
mine against the shaft that bad lodged in my heart. While I had, indeed,
been preparing my reason and my fortitude to meet such perils, weird and
marvellous, as those by which tales round the winter fireside scare the
credulous child, a contrivance--so vulgar and hackneyed that not a day
passes but what some hearth is vexed by an anonymous libel--had
wrought a calamity more dread than aught which my dark guess into the
Shadow-Land unpierced by Philosophy could trace to the prompting of
malignant witchcraft. So, ever this truth runs through all legends of
ghost and demon--through the uniform records of what wonder accredits
and science rejects as the supernatural--lo! the dread machinery whose
wheels roll through Hades! What need such awful engines for such mean
results? The first blockhead we meet in our walk to our grocer's can
tell us more than the ghost tells us; the poorest envy we ever aroused
hurts us more than the demon. How true an interpreter is Genius to Hell
as to Earth! The Fiend comes to Faust, the tired seeker of knowledge;
Heaven and Hell stake their cause in the Mortal's temptation. And what
does the Fiend to astonish the Mortal? Turn wine into fire, turn love
into crime. We need no Mephistopheles to accomplish these marvels every
day!

Thus silently thinking, I walked by the side of the world-wise woman;
and when she next spoke, I looked up, and saw that we were at the Monks'
Well, where I had first seen Lilian gazing into heaven!

Mrs. Poyntz had, as we walked, placed her hand on my arm; and, turning
abruptly from the path into the glade, I found myself standing by her
side in the scene where a new sense of being had first disclosed to my
sight the hues with which Love, the passionate beautifier, turns into
purple and gold the gray of the common air. Thus, when romance has ended
in sorrow, and the Beautiful fades from the landscape, the trite and
positive forms of life, banished for a time, reappear, and deepen our
mournful remembrance of the glories they replace. And the Woman of the
World, finding how little I was induced to respond to her when she
had talked of myself, began to speak, in her habitual clear,