He lives alone, and he cannot live alone. The deep source of love, cut off from its natural issues, then overflows and lays waste the heart which refused to expand. He has loved, too well, one too near to him, his sister it may be; she has died of it, and impotent remorse fills the soul which no human occupation could satisfy: "... My solitude is solitude no more, But peopled with the Furies;--I have gnash'd My teeth in darkness till returning morn, Then cursed myself till sunset;--I have pray'd For madness as a blessing--'tis denied me. I have affronted death--but in the war Of elements the waters shrunk from me, And fatal things pass'd harmless--the cold hand Of an all-pitiless demon held me back, Back by a single hair, which would not break. In fantasy, imagination, all The affluence of my soul.... I plunged deep, But, like an ebbing wave, it dashed me back Into the gulf of my unfathom'd thought.... I dwell in my despair, And live, and live for ever."[197] He only wishes to see her once more: to this sole and all-powerful desire flow all the energies of his soul. He calls her up in the midst of spirits; she appears, but answers not. He prays to her--with what cries, what doleful cries of deep anguish! How he loves! With what yearning and effort all his downtrodden and outcrushed tenderness gushes out and escapes at the sight of those well-beloved eyes, which he sees for the last time! With what enthusiasm his convulsive arms are stretched towards that frail form which, shuddering, has quitted the tomb!--towards those cheeks in which the blood, forcibly recalled, plants "a strange hectic--like the unnatural red which Autumn plants upon the perished leaf."