fence, fragrant with blossoms, that divided my home from the solitude.

The windows of Lilian's room were darkened; all within the house seemed
still.

Darkened and silenced Home! with the light and sounds of the jocund day
all around it. Was there yet hope in the Universe for me? All to which I
had trusted Hope had broken down! The anchors I had forged for her hold
in the beds of the ocean, her stay from the drifts of the storm, had
snapped like the reeds which pierce the side that leans on the barb of
their points, and confides in the strength of their stems. No hope in the
baffled resources of recognized knowledge! No hope in the daring
adventures of Mind into regions unknown; vain alike the calm lore of the
practised physician, and the magical arts of the fated Enchanter! I had
fled from the commonplace teachings of Nature, to explore in her
Shadow-land marvels at variance with reason. Made brave by the grandeur
of love, I had opposed without quailing the stride of the Demon, and by
hope, when fruition seemed nearest, had been trodden into dust by the
hoofs of the beast! And yet, all the while, I had scorned, as a dream
more wild than the word of a sorcerer, the hope that the old man and the
child, the wise and the ignorant, took from their souls as inborn. Man
and fiend had alike failed a mind, not ignoble, not skilless, not abjectly
craven; alike failed a heart not feeble and selfish, not dead to the
hero's devotion, willing to shed every drop of its blood for a something
more dear than an animal's life for itself! What remained--what remained
for man's hope?--man's mind and man's heart thus exhausting their all with
no other result but despair! What remained but the mystery of mysteries,
so clear to the sunrise of childhood, the sunset of age, only dimmed by
the clouds which collect round the noon of our manhood? Where yet was
Hope found? In the soul; in its every-day impulse to supplicate comfort