Midnight came on in all the gorgeous beauty of a southern heaven, and beneath its stars they renewed their march. As Falkland rode by the side of Riego, the latter said to him in a low voice, “There is yet escape for you and my followers: none for me: they have set a price on my head, and the moment I leave these mountains, I enter upon my own destruction.” “No, Rafael!” replied Falkland; “you can yet fly to England, that asylum of the free, though ally of the despotic; the abettor of tyranny, but the shelter of its victims!” Riego answered, with the same faint and dejected tone, “I care not now what becomes of me! I have lived solely for Freedom; I have made her my mistress, my hope, my dream: I have no existence but in her. With the last effort of my country let me perish also! I have lived to view liberty not only defeated, but derided: I have seen its efforts not aided, but mocked. In my own country, those only, who wore it, have been respected who used it as a covering to ambition. In other nations, the free stood aloof when the charter of their own rights was violated in the invasion of ours. I cannot forget that the senate of that England, where you promise me a home, rang with insulting plaudits when her statesman breathed his ridicule on our weakness, not his sympathy for our cause; and I--fanatic--dreamer--enthusiast, as I may be called, whose whole life has been one unremitting struggle for the opinion I have adopted, am at least not so blinded by my infatuation, but I can see the mockery it incurs. If I die on the scaffold to-morrow, I shall have nothing of martyrdom but its doom; not the triumph--the incense--the immortality of popular applause: I should have no hope to support me at such a moment, gleaned from the glories of the future--nothing but one stern and prophetic conviction of the vanity of that tyranny by which my sentence will be pronounced.” Riego paused for a moment before he resumed, and his pale and death-like countenance received an awful and unnatural light from the intensity of the feeling that swelled and burned within him. His figure was drawn up to its full height, and his voice rang through the lonely hills with a deep and hollow sound, that had in it a tone of prophecy, as he resumed “It is in vain that they oppose OPINION; anything else they may subdue. They may conquer wind, water, nature itself; but to the progress of that secret, subtle, pervading spirit, their imagination can devise, their strength can accomplish, no bar: its votaries they may seize, they may destroy; itself they cannot touch. If they check it in one place, it invades them in another. They cannot build a wall across the whole earth; and, even if they could, it would pass over its summit! Chains cannot bind it, for it is immaterial--dungeons enclose it, for it is universal. Over the faggot and the scaffold--over the bleeding bodies of its defenders which they pile against its path, it sweeps on with a noiseless but unceasing march.