mbered sources of emotion! what deep fountains
of passion and woe! Alas! whatever be its earlier triumphs, the victim
must fall at last! As the hart which the jackals pursue, the moment its
race is begun the human prey is foredoomed for destruction, not by
the single sorrow, but the thousand cares: it may baffle one race of
pursuers, but a new succeeds; as fast as some drop off exhausted, others
spring up to renew and to perpetuate the chase; and the fated, though
flying victim never escapes but in death. There was a faint smile upon
his daughter's lip, as Mordaunt bent down to kiss it; the dark lash
rested on the snowy lid--ah, that tears had no well beneath its
surface!---and her breath stole from her rich lips with so regular and
calm a motion that, like the "forest leaves," it "seemed stirred with
prayer!" [And yet the forest leaves seem stirred with prayer.--BYRON.]
One arm lay over the coverlet, the other pillowed her head, in the
unrivalled grace of infancy.

Mordaunt stooped once more, for his heart filled as he gazed upon his
child, to kiss her cheek again, and to mingle a blessing with the
kiss. When he rose, upon that fair smooth face there was one bright and
glistening drop; and Isabel stirred in sleep, and, as if suddenly vexed
by some painful dream, she sighed deeply as she stirred. It was the last
time that the cheek of the young and predestined orphan was ever pressed
by a father's kiss or moistened by a father's tear! He left the room
silently; no sooner had he left it, than, as if without the precincts
of some charmed and preserving circle, the chill and presentiment at his
heart returned. There is a feeling which perhaps all have in a momentary
hypochondria felt at times: it is a strong and shuddering impression
which Coleridge has embodied in his own dark and supernatural verse,
that something not of earth is behind us; that if we turned our gaze
backward we should behold that which would make the heart as a bolt of
ice, and the eye shrivel and parch within its socket. And so intense
is the fancy that when we turn, and all is void, from that very void we
could shape a spectre, as fearful as the image our terror had foredrawn.
Somewhat such feeling had Mordaunt now, as his steps sounded hollow and
echoless on the stairs, and the stars filled the air around him with
their shadowy and solemn presence. Breaking by a violent effort from a
spell of which he felt that a frame somewhat overtasked of late was