Then the tears gushed into my eyes, and I forgave him; for I remembered the wild energy, the passionate shriek, with which Zenobia had spoken those words, “Tell him he has murdered me!  Tell him that I’ll haunt him!”—­and I knew what murderer he meant, and whose vindictive shadow dogged the side where Priscilla was not.

The moral which presents itself to my reflections, as drawn from Hollingsworth’s character and errors, is simply this, that, admitting what is called philanthropy, when adopted as a profession, to be often useful by its energetic impulse to society at large, it is perilous to the individual whose ruling passion, in one exclusive channel, it thus becomes.  It ruins, or is fearfully apt to ruin, the heart, the rich juices of which God never meant should be pressed violently out and distilled into alcoholic liquor by an unnatural process, but should render life sweet, bland, and gently beneficent, and insensibly influence other hearts and other lives to the same blessed end.  I see in Hollingsworth an exemplification of the most awful truth in Bunyan’s book of such, from the very gate of heaven there is a by-way to the pit!

But, all this while, we have been standing by Zenobia’s grave.  I have never since beheld it, but make no question that the grass grew all the better, on that little parallelogram of pasture land, for the decay of the beautiful woman who slept beneath.  How Nature seems to love us!  And how readily, nevertheless, without a sigh or a complaint, she converts us to a meaner purpose, when her highest one—­that of a conscious intellectual life and sensibility has been untimely balked!  While Zenobia lived, Nature was proud of her, and directed all eyes upon that radiant presence, as her fairest handiwork.  Zenobia perished.  Will not Nature shed a tear?  Ah, no!—­ she adopts the calamity at once into her system, and is just as well pleased, for aught we can see, with the tuft of ranker vegetation that grew out of Zenobia’s heart, as with all the beauty which has bequeathed us no earthly representative except in this crop of weeds.  It is because the spirit is inestimable that the lifeless body is so little valued.

XXIX.  MILES COVERDALE’S CONFESSION

It remains only to say a few words about myself.  Not improbably, the reader might be willing to spare me the trouble; for I have made but a poor and dim figure in my own narrative, establishing no separate interest, and suffering my colorless life to take its hue from other lives.  But one still retains some little consideration for one’s self; so I keep these last two or three pages for my individual and sole behoof.