world. His head drooped upon his bosom; he clung to the area for
support: the crowd passed on; they were in pursuit of guilt; they were
thirsting after blood; they were going to fill the dungeon and feed
the gibbet; what to them was the virtue they could have supported, or
the famine they could have relieved? But they knew not his distress,
nor the extent of his weakness, or some would have tarried and aided:
for there is, after all, as much kindness as cruelty in our nature;
perhaps they thought it was only some intoxicated and maudlin idler;
or, perhaps, in the heat of their pursuit, they thought not at all.

So they rolled on, and their voices died away, and their steps were
hushed, and Glendower, insensible and cold as the iron he clung to,
was once more alone. Slowly he revived; he opened his dim and glazing
eyes, and saw the evening star break from its chamber, and, though
sullied by the thick and foggy air, scatter its holy smiles upon the
polluted city.

He looked quietly on the still night, and its first watcher among the
hosts of heaven, and felt something of balm sink into his soul; not,
indeed, that vague and delicious calm which, in his boyhood of poesy
and romance, he had drunk in, by green solitudes, from the mellow
twilight: but a quiet, sad and sober, circling gradually over his
mind, and bringing it back from its confused and disordered visions
and darkness to the recollection and reality of his bitter life.

By degrees the scene he had so imperfectly witnessed, the fight of the
robber and the eager pursuit of the mob, grew over him: a dark and
guilty thought burst upon his mind.

"I am a man like that criminal," said he, fiercely. "I have nerves,