digality of words in which I might endeavour to give their significance expression. But there is one great building which, defying the employment of any poetical art in its notice, yet by that plain homeliness of name appeals to a deeper mode of poetry: for the General Post Office, to me at least (but I think with justice), has long appeared the most pathetic and representative of our civic monuments, the central heart of that human interest which, spread through a circuit almost illimitable, radiates round London. It is not that the granite flags, moss-stained here and there, or saddened with the yellow withering of interstitial grass, are conscious of the hurrying tread of the vast multitude, a nation indeed dispersed over the whole world, for whom, within the noble atrium, messages of love and desertion, wealth and ruin, death and life, are waiting their season; for during much of the day the great city contains few spots of profounder solitude. But this solitude itself, lying within the shadow of the vast Cathedral, and like the islands of the Nile or Niagara, almost impassive amidst a roar which has hardly paused for centuries, touched me when, returning to England after the visit described, a 'spirit in my feet' led me there first from the clamorous railway-more deeply through the double contrast thus presented; the tumult and trepidation of life without, and the heart-audible voices within, oracular of ten thousand destinies. Mine, too, I thought, did that lie here? Like a pilgrim at Delphi or Jerusalem, I could have bowed before the shrine with awe; and as I thought, I looked upwards with the look which is prayer to the

Cross of gold

That shines over city and river,

-and O! thence onwards in fancy to the high crucifix above the Moselle valley, and Désirée standing beneath, and that last glance of confiding earnest eyes, whose

message had seemed more than farewell. Now first I felt what it is to have cast oneself, like a child cradled in the arms of Fate, on the Unchangeable and the Irresistible. My destiny might be lying here, but less than royal prerogative would not unfold it to me before the morning: it might be lying here, and if so, Omnipotence itself, without miracle, could not now reverse it.

II Othello was played that evening at a half-crowded and noisy theatre: in the autumnal absence of all friends with whom I might deceive the hours, I went eagerly. This was a foolish resource. 'Faith, half asleep' like Desdemona, to the tawdry Venice of the stage, and the declamation of so many passionate words fit only for whispering, alone in the crowd with thoughts of Désirée, when I heard

If Heaven would make me such another world

Of one entire and perfect chrysolite

I'd not have sold her for it:

-I laughed almost in irony. He, who against his 'soul's 'joy' endured, even for a moment or a metaphor, to set any earthly treasure in the balance, could have loved, I thought, but little. To gain the whole world, and lose one's own soul's Darling, what would it profit ? I went in imagination from Cyprus and Venice to Verona, and, in Romeo's answer to Laurence, found a far homelier and higher passion, a something which seemed to speak all the immense yearning, the eager tenderness of such a crisis as mine, in language itself 'deep as love':

Come what sorrow can

It cannot countervail the exchange of joy
That one short minute gives me in her sight.
Do thou but close our hands with holy words,
Then love-devouring Death do what he dare,
It is enough I may but call her mine.

If these words seemed a bright omen for that evening, if I accepted them as my last thought and augury before sleep, this was not an individual weakness. I am not alone in the folly, if folly it is, which finds that 'my 'Shakspeare,' as with one who came nearest in glory, every Englishman is privileged to call him,-in many inspired lines has furnished eternal oracles for his countrymen.

III These words ringing through my memory, and hardly daring to wish it day, I slept: and when day came, inwardly certain that I distinguished already the steps of the messenger, bearing from that central station the lines of fate along the most crowded streets of London,—going out into a certain place shadowed with trees and gay with the last autumnal flowers, almost, I may truly say, without hope or fear, I awaited his arrival. For excluding as tormentors, useless now when the decision had already gone forth, these passions-by effort of will I summoned. to the sessions of sweet silent thought' the image of Désirée alone, and her high and holy nature; all she had been from her dear childhood, all that promise for a hereafter bounded only by eternity.

Da war es gleich als ob der Himmel glänzte;
Mir schien, als wäre nichts mir, nichts engangen,
Als hätt' ich alles, was ich je genossen.

-My own and only love: Désirée ! my darling Désirée ! . . .
And then, my nurse's words, the trust in God', on my
lips and in my heart, I opened the letter.
I need no

words to tell her answer: the sentence of Anteros, firm, affectionate, final: I have none to tell- could a Spirit say, snatched down from the innermost court of Heaven by his own guardian Angel, what or how was the transition from eternal love to eternal fires? Adam narrate the loss of Eden? A mother the death of her only child, plague

struck in its flower of beauty, precious beyond words in life, and after death mourned in a silence profound as that of the grave to which she bears her affection? She sits by meanwhile, she holds the little hands in hers, she feels the dear warmth ebbing: the hours strike: her bitterest grief, all perhaps she can remember hereafter through many years (it was mine), is to know she was then nearer darling than, by the unmerciful severance of distancing time, she can ever be again. We close the door: such things

are sacred.

IV Indeed I could scarcely tell, if I wished it, how that day passed. When, in later years, towards the conclusion of this sad story,—if conclusion I. should call it where the sorrow and the passion in unabated intensity are awaiting the 'so long impossible Rest,' if Rest it be,-when, more experienced in the conflicts of Eros and Anteros, again I traversed this Valley of Death, the dreadful passage from hope to despair, all circumstances of that hour remained vividly rememberable: I could measure with an awful distinctness all I had lost, and how lost it. But now, though master sufficiently of self to resume my daily formal tasks, it was beneath a vague sense of change so vast and all-affecting, that I seemed in a phantom world, where the light had faded from the sun, the blue blanched itself from the sky, no true existence left, God's curse standing forth in colossal form alone, and disrealizing His universe into shadowy annihilation. And as we read of a man stunned by one overwhelming blow, who, in his trance, hears voices around and those imploring him to give some sign of life, and can give no sign, but is carried living to the pit; so, throughout this and many days succeeding, was it with me. Then, during moments beyond control, came back (the pure thought of her utter dearness with a sword's

thrust as it were and trenchancy of ineffable anguish, with the tears that bring no healing', the corroding / hunger of the heart. When night returned, and solitude, solitude, which during day-time and the enforced mastery of myself in others' presence had been the one wish surviving, fell beneath the curse also. Désirée haunted me there still, and ah! whither should I fly from her presence? I was appalled by the unsympathy of Nature; in the madness of misery I was fain to throw a grappling-hook over the round moon, and drag her from her course, and it surprized me that the stars kept their stations in heaven.

V Beneath this heavy blindness and anarchy of soul three or four months went by, where, and how occupied, I am entirely and finally unable to remember. In whatever spots within England, or elsewhere, what seemed my presence may have been, they knew me not: I was meanwhile wandering on eternally over Sahara; within the whole horizon circle nothing but the white flame of a Libyan sky, the fierce lashless eye of the sun, the long currents of tremulous hissing sand blown before me like mist by the Sarsar wind, and the shadow which, contracting and dilating, marked what in the world without was the passage of living hours. No mirage vision gave a moment's delusive happiness no reasoning on the past, no thought of blame. or of requested mercy, no regret for action or for delay, no sense of deserved punishment and of remorse, the last comfort spared even in the abyss, relieved by interrupting that long monotony of desolation. All I recollect of outward life is that meanwhile I must have pursued my common employments in silence and with what calm I could, blindly recognizing with terror the absolute nothingness of any human sympathy; going about, as the great Christian Pilgrim has described in some memorable pages