image that had consecrated the forest-glooms; there is the flaw in all my work,—­I have shorn, but have never uprooted an evil.  Youth is a fool; the young Titans cannot scale heaven,—­heaven, that, if what I live through be true, is ramparted round with tyrant lies!  But is it true?  Am I what I seem to myself?  Did I fail in my purpose, in my will?  Did Italy herself belie me?  Did she, did she I loved, she I worshipped, she the woman to whom I gave all, for whom I sacrificed all, did she, too, forsake me?  Ah, no! you will tell me Italy is free.  But I did not free her!  She waits only to put on in Venice her tiara.  And for that other one, that fair Austrian woman, that devil whom I serve and adore, that yellow-haired witch who brewed her incantations in my holiest raptures,—­she did not then play me foul, and falsely feign love to win me to disgrace?  May all the woes in Heaven’s hands fall on her!

God! what have I said?  That I should live to ban her with a word!  Did I say it?  Oh, but it was vain!  Woe for her?  No, no! all blessings shower upon her, sunshine attend her, peace and gladness dwell about her!  Traitress though she were, I must love her yet; I cannot unlove her; I would take her into my heart, and fold my arms about her.—­Oh, I pray you do not look upon me with that mocking smile!  Pity me, rather! pity this wretched heart that longs to curse God and die!—­Nay, I want not your idle words.  Can good destroy?  Can love persecute?  I was a worm that turned.  What then?  Why not have crushed me to annihilation?  Oh, no, not that!  He took me up and shook me before the world, clipped me, and let me fall.  A derisive Deity,—­why, the words give each other the lie!

Stop!  Your sad eyes look as if you would go away, but for this infinite pity in you.  What makes you pity me?  Because I am shorn of my strength? because of all my fair proportions there is nothing left unshrivelled? because my body—­such as it is—­is racked with hourly and perpetual pain? because I die?  For none of these?  Truly, your judgments are insenilable.  For what then?  Because,—­yet, no, that cannot be,—­because I bear a stubborn heart? because I will not bend my soul as He has bent my body?  Partly,—­but you are witless!  What else?  Because I toss off a shield and buckler, you say.  Because I will not lean upon a tower of strength.  Because I will not throw myself on the tide of divine love, and trust myself to its course.  It was that divine love, then, that tower of strength, that shield and buckler, that made me this thing you see.  Tarpeia was enough.  Away with your generalities!  Go, go, you slave of the past!

Yet no,—­you have not gone?  You believe what you say,—­I know with those eyes you cannot deceive.  Ah, but I trusted her eyes once!  Yet it gives you rest;—­your sorrows are not like mine,—­there is no rest for me.  I cannot go and gather that balm of Gilead,—­I have no legs.  I have as good as none.  This wheel-chair and that dog of a turnkey are not the