"Where?" asked I.

"Wherever we are going," he replied. "I have been there a great many
times, and, oh! I am very tired of it."

"But why are you here at all, then; and why don't you stop?"

There was a singular mixture of a hundred conflicting emotions in his
face, as I spoke. The representative grandeur of a race, which he
sometimes showed in his look, faded into a glance of hopeless and puny
despair. His eyes looked at me curiously, his chest heaved, and there
was clearly a struggle in his mind, between some lofty and mean
desire. At times, I saw only the austere suffering of ages in his
strongly-carved features, and again I could see nothing but the
second-hand black hat above them. He rubbed his forehead with his
skinny hand; he glanced over his shoulder, as if calculating whether
he had time to speak to me; and then, as a splendid defiance flashed
from his piercing eyes, so that I know how Milton's Satan looked, he
said, bitterly, and with hopeless sorrow, that no mortal voice ever
knew before:

"I cannot stop: my woe is infinite, like my sin!"--and he passed into
the mist.

But, in a few moments, he reappeared. I could now see only the hat,
which sank more and more over his face, until it covered it entirely;
and I heard a querulous voice, which seemed to be quarrelling with
itself, for saying what it was compelled to say, so that the words
were even more appalling than what it had said before: