spark may yet be rekindled by a breath of heaven. Perhaps you may
yet be permitted to die before it is too late to live eternally.
You have my prayers for such a consummation. Farewell."

"Your prayers will be in vain," replied he, with a smile of cold
triumph. "My destiny is linked with the realities of earth. You
are welcome to your visions and shadows of a future state; but give
me what I can see, and touch, and understand, and I ask no more."

"It is indeed too late," thought I. "The soul is dead within him."

Struggling between pity and horror, I extended my hand, to which the
virtuoso gave his own, still with the habitual courtesy of a man of
the world, but without a single heart-throb of human brotherhood.
The touch seemed like ice, yet I know not whether morally or
physically. As I departed, he bade me observe that the inner door
of the hall was constructed with the ivory leaves of the gateway
through which Aeneas and the Sibyl had been dismissed from Hades.