CHAPTER V.


With all her persuasion of her own powers in penetrating the future,
we have seen that Hilda had never consulted her oracles on the fate of
Harold, without a dark and awful sense of the ambiguity of their
responses. That fate, involving the mightiest interests of a great
race, and connected with events operating on the farthest times and
the remotest lands, lost itself to her prophetic ken amidst omens the
most contradictory, shadows and lights the most conflicting, meshes
the most entangled. Her human heart, devotedly attached to the Earl,
through her love for Edith,--her pride obstinately bent on securing to
the last daughter of her princely race that throne, which all her
vaticinations, even when most gloomy, assured her was destined to the
man with whom Edith's doom was interwoven, combined to induce her to
the most favourable interpretation of all that seemed sinister and
doubtful. But according to the tenets of that peculiar form of magic
cultivated by Hilda, the comprehension became obscured by whatever
partook of human sympathy. It was a magic wholly distinct from the
malignant witchcraft more popularly known to us, and which was equally
common to the Germanic and Scandinavian heathens.

The magic of Hilda was rather akin to the old Cimbrian Alirones, or
sacred prophetesses; and, as with them, it demanded the priestess--
that is, the person without human ties or emotions, a spirit clear as
a mirror, upon which the great images of destiny might be cast
untroubled.