equipage for such a journey.—­Ah, do not turn from me now!  My railing is worse than my cursing, you feel indeed.  Well, stay with me at least, and if it is twelve years since you shrived me at first, perhaps you shall shrive me at last,—­for I doubt if I am ever brought out to this sunshine again, if I do not die in the prison-damps to-night,—­and you, with all your change, are Father Anshmo, I think.—­Stay, I will confess to you, confess this.  Man! man! this infinite pity of your soul for mine throws a light on my dark ways; God’s curse has fallen on me through man’s curse, why not God’s love through man’s love?  Anselmo, though you became priest, and I went to become hero, we were children together; I was dear to you then; I am so still, it seems.  In your love let me find the love of that Heaven I have defied.—­Stay, friend, yet another word.  If man’s love can be so great, what can God’s love be?  That which I said I said, in desperation; in very truth, that peace hangs like an unattainable city in the clouds before my soul’s vision, that love like a broad river flowing through the lands, an atmosphere bathing the worlds, the subtile essence and ether of space in which the farthest star pursues its course,—­why, then, should it escape me, the mote?  Oh, when the world turned from me, I sought to flee thither!  I sighed for the rest there!  Wretched, alone, I have wept in the dark and in the light that I might go and fling myself at the heavenly feet.  But, do you see? sin has broken down the bridge between God and me.  Yet why, then, is sin in the world,—­that scum that rises in the creation and fermentation of good,—­why, but as a bridge on which to re-seek those shores from which we wander?  Man, I do repent me,—­in loving you I find God.  And you call that blasphemy!—­Nay, go, indeed, my friend!  So humble, you are not the man for me.  I can talk to the winds:  they, at least, do not visit me too roughly.

These are thy tears, Anselmo?  Thou a priest, yet a man?  Still with me?  Yet thou wilt have to bear with wayward moods,—­scorn now, quiet then.  I am a tetchy man; I am an old man, too, though but just past thirty.—­So!  I thank God for thee, dear friend!

* * * * *

Anselmo, look out on this scene below us here, as we sit on our lofty battlement.  Not on the turrets or the loopholes, the grates and spikes, or all the fortified horror,—­but on the earth.  It is fair earth, though not Italy; this is a mountain-fortress; here are all the lights and shadows that play over grand hill-countries, and yonder are fields of grain, where the winds and sunbeams play at storm, and a little hamlet’s sheltered valley.  Doubtless there are towers, besides, half hidden in the hills.  It is Austria:  slaves tread it, and tyrants drain it, it is true,—­but the wild, free gypsies troop now and then across it, and though no fiction of law supports a claim they would scorn to make, they use it so that you would swear they own it.  Do