While I lay helpless, I heard the whirlwind roar through the cloudy hill; and the vapours began to revolve.  A pale light, like that of the rising moon, quivered on their edges; and the clouds rose, and rapidly shaped themselves into the forms of battlements and towers.  Voices were heard within, low and distant, yet strangely sweet.  Still the lustre brightened, and the airy building rose, tower on tower, and battlement on battlement.  In awe we knelt and gazed upon this more than mortal architecture.  It stood full to earth and heaven, the colossal image of the first Temple.  All Jerusalem saw the image; and the shout that, in the midst of their despair, ascended from its thousands and tens of thousands told what proud remembrances were there.  But a hymn was heard, that might have hushed the world.  Never fell on mortal ear sound so majestic and subduing, so full of melancholy and grandeur and command.  The vast portal opened, and from it marched a host such as man had never seen before, such as man shall never see but once again; the guardian angels of the city of David!  They came forth glorious, but with woe in their steps, tears flowing down their celestial beauty.  “Let us go hence,” was their song of sorrow.  “Let us go hence,” was announced by the echoes of the mountains.

The procession lingered on the summit.  The thunder pealed, and they rose at the command, diffusing waves of light over the expanse of heaven.  Then the thunder roared again; the cloudy temple was scattered on the winds; and darkness, the omen of her grave, settled upon Jerusalem.

IV.—­The Hour of Doom

I was roused by the voice of a man.  “What!” said he, “poring over the faces of dead men, when you should be foremost among the living?  All Jerusalem in arms, and yet you scorn your time to gain laurels?” I sprang up, and drew my scimitar, for the man was—­Roman.

“You should know me,” he said calmly; “it is some years since we met, but we have not been often asunder.”

“Are you not a Roman?” I exclaimed.  He denied that nationality, and offered me his Roman trappings, cuirass and falchion, saying they would help me to money, riot, violence, and vice in the doomed city; “and,” said he, “what else do nine-tenths of mankind ask for in their souls?”

He tore his helmet from his forehead, and, with a start of inward pain, flung it to a measureless distance in the air.  I beheld—­Epiphanes!  “I told you,” he said, “that this day would come.  One grand hope was given to your countrymen; they cast it from them!  Ages on ages shall pass before they learn the loftiness of that hope, or fulfill the punishment of that rejection.  Yet, in the fullness of time, light shall break upon their darkness.  They shall ask:  Why are barbarians and civilised alike our oppressors?  Why do contending faiths join in crushing us alone?  Why do realms, distant as the ends of the earth, unite in scorn of us?”

“Man of terrible knowledge,” I demanded, “tell me for what crime this judgment comes?”