So ended Sibyl's legend; in which Septimius was struck by a certain analogy
to Aunt Keziah's Indian legend,--both referring to a flower growing out of
a grave; and also he did not fail to be impressed with the wild
coincidence of this disappearance of an ancestor of the family long ago,
and the appearance, at about the same epoch, of the first known ancestor
of his own family, the man with wizard's attributes, with the bloody
footstep, and whose sudden disappearance became a myth, under the idea
that the Devil carried him away. Yet, on the whole, this wild tradition,
doubtless becoming wilder in Sibyl's wayward and morbid fancy, had the
effect to give him a sense of the fantasticalness of his present pursuit,
and that in adopting it, he had strayed into a region long abandoned to
superstition, and where the shadows of forgotten dreams go when men are
done with them; where past worships are; where great Pan went when he died
to the outer world; a limbo into which living men sometimes stray when
they think themselves sensiblest and wisest, and whence they do not often
find their way back into the real world. Visions of wealth, visions of
fame, visions of philanthropy,--all visions find room here, and glide
about without jostling. When Septimius came to look at the matter in his
present mood, the thought occurred to him that he had perhaps got into
such a limbo, and that Sibyl's legend, which looked so wild, might be all
of a piece with his own present life; for Sibyl herself seemed an
illusion, and so, most strangely, did Aunt Keziah, whom he had known all
his life, with her homely and quaint characteristics; the grim doctor,
with his brandy and his German pipe, impressed him in the same way; and
these, altogether, made his homely cottage by the wayside seem an
unsubstantial edifice, such as castles in the air are built of, and the
ground he trod on unreal; and that grave, which he knew to contain the
decay of a beautiful young man, but a fictitious swell, formed by the
fantasy of his eyes. All unreal; all illusion! Was Rose Garfield a
deception too, with her daily beauty, and daily cheerfulness, and daily