Woman, dost thou not repent thee?  Flying from imaginary fears, hast thou not come to the very lair of terror, where Danger sits visible and incarnate?  Oh, if we could but meet, wouldst thou not fall upon the bosom thou hast so wronged, and feel, poor wanderer amidst the storms, as if thou hadst regained the shelter?  Mejnour, still my researches fail me.  I mingle with all men, even their judges and their spies, but I cannot yet gain the clew.  I know that she is here.  I know it by an instinct; the breath of my child seems warmer and more familiar.

They peer at me with venomous looks, as I pass through their streets.  With a glance I disarm their malice, and fascinate the basilisks.  Everywhere I see the track and scent the presence of the Ghostly One that dwells on the Threshold, and whose victims are the souls that would aspire, and can only fear.  I see its dim shapelessness going before the men of blood, and marshalling their way.  Robespierre passed me with his furtive step.  Those eyes of horror were gnawing into his heart.  I looked down upon their senate; the grim Phantom sat cowering on its floor.  It hath taken up its abode in the city of Dread.  And what in truth are these would-be builders of a new world?  Like the students who have vainly struggled after our supreme science, they have attempted what is beyond their power; they have passed from this solid earth of usages and forms into the land of shadow, and its loathsome keeper has seized them as its prey.  I looked into the tyrant’s shuddering soul, as it trembled past me.  There, amidst the ruins of a thousand systems which aimed at virtue, sat Crime, and shivered at its desolation.  Yet this man is the only Thinker, the only Aspirant, amongst them all.  He still looks for a future of peace and mercy, to begin,—­ay! at what date?  When he has swept away every foe.  Fool! new foes spring from every drop of blood.  Led by the eyes of the Unutterable, he is walking to his doom.

O Viola, thy innocence protects thee!  Thou whom the sweet humanities of love shut out even from the dreams of aerial and spiritual beauty, making thy heart a universe of visions fairer than the wanderer over the rosy Hesperus can survey,—­shall not the same pure affection encompass thee, even here, with a charmed atmosphere, and terror itself fall harmless on a life too innocent for wisdom?

CHAPTER 7.IV.

     Ombra piu che di notte, in cui di luce
     Raggio misto non e;

....

     Ne piu il palagio appar, ne piu le sue
     Vestigia; ne dir puossi—­egli qui fue. 
     —­“Ger.  Lib.”, canto xvi.-lxix.

     (Darkness greater than of night, in which not a ray of light is
     mixed;...The palace appears no more:  not even a vestige,—­nor
     can one say that it has been.)