I gazed on the glorious hope which lighted up his radiant brow, and I said to him, “Give me an immortality which must be thine.”  Worlds rolling on worlds lay beneath our feet when we stood beside the waters of life.  A joyful pride swelled in my heart.  I, the last and the weakest of my race, had won that prize which its heroes and its sages had found too mighty for their grasp.  A sound, as of a storm rushing over ocean, startled me when I stooped to drink, the troubled waves rose into tumultuous eddies, their fiery billows parted, and from amid them appeared the dark and terrible Spirit of Necessity.  The cloud of his awful face grew deeper as it turned on me.  “Child of a sinful and a fallen kind!” said he, and he spoke the language most familiar to my ear, which yet sounded like that of another world, “who have ever measured by their own small wisdom that which is infinite—­drink, and be immortal!  Be immortal, without the wisdom or the power belonging unto immortality.  Drink!”

I shrunk from the starry waters as they rose to my lip, but a power stronger than my will compelled me to their taste.  The draught ran through my veins like ice.  Slowly I turned to where my once-worshipped lover was leaning.  The same change had passed over both.  Our eyes met, and each looked into the other’s heart, and there dwelt hate—­bitter, loathing, and eternal hate.  I had changed my nature; I was no longer the gentle, up-looking mortal he had loved.  I had changed my nature; he was no longer to me the one glorious and adored being.  We gazed on each other with fear and abhorrence.  The dark power, whose awful brow was fixed upon us like Fate, again was shrouded in the kindling waters.  By an impulse neither could control, the Spirit and I flung ourselves down the steep, blue air, but apart and each muttering, “Never! never!” And that word “never” told our destiny.  Never could either feel again that sweet deceit of happiness, which, if it be a lie, is worth all truth.  Never more could each heart be the world of the other.

Our feelings are as little in our power as the bodily structure they animate.  My love had been sudden, uncontrollable, and born not of my own will—­and such was my hate.  As little could I master the sick shudder his image now called up, as I could the passionate beating of the heart it had once excited.  I stood alone in my solitary hall—­I gazed on the eternal fire burning over the tomb of my father, and I wished it were burning over mine.  For the first time I felt the limitations of humanity.  The desire of my race was in me accomplished—­I was immortal! and what was this immortality?  A dark and measureless future.  Alas! we had mistaken life for felicity!  What was my knowledge? it only served to show its own vanity; what was my power, when its exercise only served to work out the decrees of an inexorable necessity?  I had parted myself from my kind, but I had not acquired the nature of a spirit.  I had lost of humanity but its illusions,