But she continued to hover around the church, and seems to have had full freedom of entrance in the daytime, and special license, on one occasion at least, at a late hour of the night.  She went thither with a dark-lantern, which could but twinkle like a glow-worm through the volume of obscurity that filled the great dusky edifice.  Groping her way up the aisle and towards the chancel, she sat down on the elevated part of the pavement above Shakspeare’s grave.  If the divine poet really wrote the inscription there, and cared as much about the quiet of his bones as its deprecatory earnestness would imply, it was time for those crumbling relics to bestir themselves under her sacrilegious feet.  But they were safe.  She made no attempt to disturb them; though, I believe, she looked narrowly into the crevices between Shakspeare’s and the two adjacent stones, and in some way satisfied herself that her single strength would suffice to lift the former, in case of need.  She threw the feeble ray of her lantern up towards the bust, but could not make it visible beneath the darkness of the vaulted roof.  Had she been subject to superstitious terrors, it is impossible to conceive of a situation that could better entitle her to feel them, for, if Shakspeare’s ghost would rise at any provocation, it must have shown itself then; but it is my sincere belief, that, if his figure had appeared within the scope of her dark-lantern, in his slashed doublet and gown, and with his eyes bent on her beneath the high, bald forehead, just as we see him in the bust, she would have met him fearlessly, and controverted his claims to the authorship of the plays, to his very face.  She had taught herself to contemn “Lord Leicester’s groom” (it was one of her disdainful epithets for the world’s incomparable poet) so thoroughly, that even his disembodied spirit would hardly have found civil treatment at Miss Bacon’s hands.

Her vigil, though it appears to have had no definite object, continued far into the night.  Several times she heard a low movement in the aisles:  a stealthy, dubious foot-fall prowling about in the darkness, now here, now there, among the pillars and ancient tombs, as if some restless inhabitant of the latter had crept forth to peep at the intruder.  By-and-by the clerk made his appearance, and confessed that he had been watching her ever since she entered the church.

About this time it was that a strange sort of weariness seems to have fallen upon her:  her toil was all but done, her great purpose, as she believed, on the very point of accomplishment, when she began to regret that so stupendous a mission had been imposed on the fragility of a woman.  Her faith in the new philosophy was as mighty as ever, and so was her confidence in her own adequate development of it, now about to be given to the world; yet she wished, or fancied so, that it might never have been her duty to achieve this unparalleled task, and to stagger feebly forward