sable robe. Next appears a shade of ruined loveliness, with dust
among her golden hair, and her bright garments all faded and defaced,
stealing from your glance with drooping head, as fearful of reproach;
she was your fondest Hope, but a delusive one; so call her
Disappointment now. A sterner form succeeds, with a brow of wrinkles,
a look and gesture of iron authority; there is no name for him unless
it be Fatality, an emblem of the evil influence that rules your
fortunes; a demon to whom you subjected yourself by some error at the
outset of life, and were bound his slave forever, by once obeying him.
See! those fiendish lineaments graven on the darkness, the writhed lip
of scorn, the mockery of that living eye, the pointed finger, touching
the sore place in your heart! Do you remember any act of enormous
folly, at which you would blush, even in the remotest cavern of the
earth? Then recognize your Shame.

Pass, wretched band! Well for the wakeful one, if, riotously
miserable, a fiercer tribe do not surround him, the devils of a guilty
heart, that holds its hell within itself. What if Remorse should
assume the features of an injured friend? What if the fiend should
come in woman's garments, with a pale beauty amid sin and desolation,
and lie down by your side? What if he should stand at your bed's
foot, in the likeness of a corpse, with a bloody stain upon the
shroud? Sufficient without such guilt is this nightmare of the soul;
this heavy, heavy sinking of the spirits; this wintry gloom about the
heart; this indistinct horror of the mind, blending itself with the
darkness of the chamber.

By a desperate effort, you start upright, breaking from a sort of
conscious sleep, and gazing wildly round the bed, as if the fiends
were anywhere but in your haunted mind. At the same moment, the