“The man whose old mould underneath us is hid
  Meant a great deal more good and less harm than he did. 
  He knelt in yon church ’mid the worshipping throng,
  And vowed to do right, but went out to do wrong;
  For, going up of a Sunday to look at the gate
  Of Saints’ Alley, he stuck there and found it was strait,
  And slid back of a Monday to walk in the way
  That is popular, populous, smooth-paved, and gay. 
  The flesh it was strong, but the spirit was faint. 
  He first was too young, then too old, for a saint. 
  He wished well by his neighbors, did well by himself,
  And hoped for salvation, and struggled for pelf;
  And easy Tomorrow still promised to pay
  The still swelling debts of his bankrupt Today,
  Till, bestriding the deep sudden chasm that is fixed
  The sunshiny world and the shadowy betwixt,
  His Today with a pale wond’ring face stood alone,
  And over the border Tomorrow had flown. 
  So after went he, his accounts as he could
  To settle and make his loose reckonings good,
  And left us his tomb and his skeleton under,—­
  Two boons to his race,—­to sit down on and ponder. 
  Heaven help him!  Yet heaven, I fear, he hath lost. 
  Here lies his poor dust; but where cries his poor ghost? 
  We know not.  Perhaps we shall see by-and-by,
  When out of our coffins we get, you and I.”

AGNES OF SORRENTO.

CHAPTER X.

THE INTERVIEW.

The dreams of Agnes, on the night after her conversation with the monk and her singular momentary interview with the cavalier, were a strange mixture of images, indicating the peculiarities of her education and habits of daily thought.

She dreamed that she was sitting alone in the moonlight, and heard some one rustling in the distant foliage of the orange-groves, and from them came a young man dressed in white of a dazzling clearness like sunlight; large pearly wings fell from his shoulders and seemed to shimmer with a phosphoric radiance; his forehead was broad and grave, and above it floated a thin, tremulous tongue of flame; his eyes had that deep, mysterious gravity which is so well expressed in all the Florentine paintings of celestial beings:  and yet, singularly enough, this white-robed, glorified form seemed to have the features and lineaments of the mysterious cavalier of the evening before,—­the same deep, mournful, dark eyes, only that in them the light of earthly pride had given place to the calm, strong gravity of an assured peace,—­the same broad forehead,—­the same delicately chiselled features, but elevated and etherealized, glowing with a kind of interior ecstasy.  He seemed to move from the shadow of the orange-trees with a backward floating of his lustrous garments, as if borne on a cloud just along the surface of the ground; and in his hand he held the lily-spray, all radiant