It was death? Well, what matter? She had gone out with
him, and in some cloud-walled castle, murmurous with harmonies of
quiring spheres, and gleaming with their radiance, they would dwell
together. Human vengeance could not reach them there, and for love
there is no death. The soul cannot die, and love, its chiefest
offspring, shares its immortality. It persists throughout the ages,
like the waves of music that never cease. He would take her hand and
lead her upward--Where was she? Surely she must be by his side. But he
could see no one, feel no presence. God! had he lost her? Had she
been borne upward and away, while he had lingered, fascinated with
the empty clay that a moment since had been throbbing with life
and keenest happiness? But he would find her--even did he go to the
confines of Eternity. But where was he? He could see the lifeless
shells no longer. He was roaming--on--on--in a vast, grey, pathless
land, without light, without sound, unpeopled, forsaken. These were
the plains of Eternity!--the measureless, boundless, sun-forgotten
region, whose monarch was Death, and whose avenging angel--Silence! An
eternal twilight more desolate than the blackness of night, a twilight
as of myriads of ghostly lanterns shedding their colorless rays upon
an awful, echoless solitude He would never find her here The dead of
ages were about him--the troubled spirits who had approached the pale,
stern gates of the Hereafter with rapture, and found within their
portals not rest, but a ceaseless, weary, purposeless wandering, the
world tired souls of aged men pursuing their never-ending quest in
meek, faltering wonder, and longing for the goal which surely they
must reach at last, the white, unquestioning souls of children
floating like heavenly strains of unheard music in the void immensity,
but one and all invisible imponderable.
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