been directed to apply his torch from below. He did so. The fiery smoke
rose upwards in billowing volumes. A Dominican monk was then standing
almost at her side. Wrapt up in his sublime office, he saw not the danger,
but still persisted in his prayers. Even then, when the last enemy was
racing up the fiery stairs to seize her, even at that moment did this
noblest of girls think only for _him_, the one friend that would not
forsake her, and not for herself; bidding him with her last breath to care
for his own preservation, but to leave _her_ to God. That girl, whose
latest breath ascended in this sublime expression of self-oblivion, did not
utter the word _recant_ either with her lips or in her heart. No; she did
not, though one should rise from the dead to swear it.

* * * * *

Bishop of Beauvais! thy victim died in fire upon a scaffold--thou upon a
down bed. But for the departing minutes of life, both are oftentimes alike.
At the farewell crisis, when the gates of death are opening, and flesh is
resting from its struggles, oftentimes the tortured and the torturer have
the same truce from carnal torment; both sink together into sleep; together
both, sometimes, kindle into dreams. When the mortal mists were gathering
fast upon you two, Bishop and Shepherd girl--when the pavilions of life
were closing up their shadowy curtains about you--let us try, through the
gigantic glooms, to decipher the flying features of your separate visions.

The shepherd girl that had delivered France--she, from her dungeon, she,
from her baiting at the stake, she, from her duel with fire, as she entered
her last dream--saw Domrémy, saw the fountain of Domrémy, saw the pomp of
forests in which her childhood had wandered. That Easter festival, which
man had denied to her languishing heart--that resurrection of spring-time,
which the darkness of dungeons had intercepted from _her_, hungering after