“_Hæc fabula docet_,” writes our Flaxius, “that mysteries abound in every myth. Now, whether Orpheus was literally the first man who ever went to hell for a woman I know not, but well I ween that he was not the last, as the majority of French novelists of the present day are chiefly busy in proving, very little, as it seems to me, either to the credit of their country or of themselves. But there are others who read in this tale a dark and mysterious forewarning to the effect that ladies _à la mode_ who fall in love with Italian musicians or music-masters, and especially those who let themselves and their fortunes be _sifflées_ (especially the fortunes), should not be astonished when the fate of Eurydice befalls them. Pass on, beloved, to another tale! “‘Walk on, amid these mysteries strange and old, The strangest of them all is yet to come!’” INTIALO THE SPIRIT OF THE HAUNTING SHADOW “O ombra che dalla luce siei uscita, Misuri il passo al Sole, all’uom la vita.” “Umbram suam mètuere.” “Badate. La vostra ombra vi avrà fatto paura.” —_Filippo Pananti_. “There is a feeling which, perhaps, all have felt at times; . . . it is a strong and shuddering impression which Coleridge has embodied in his own dark and supernatural verse that Something not of earth is behind us—that if we turned our gaze backward we should behold that which would make the heart as a bolt of ice, and the eye shrivel and parch within its socket. And so intense is the fancy, that _when_ we turn, and all is void, from that very void we could shape a spectre as fearful as the image our terror had foredrawn.”—BULWER, _The Disowned_. The resemblance and the relation of the shadow to the body is so strangely like that of the body to the soul, that it is very possible that it first suggested the latter. It is born of light, yet is in itself a portion of the mystery of darkness; it is the facsimile of man in every outline, but in outline alone; filled in with uniform sombre tint, it imitates our every action as if in mockery, which of itself suggests a goblin or sprite, while in it all there is something of self, darkling and dream-like, yet never leaving us. It is only evident in brightest hours, like a skeleton at an Egyptian feast, and it has neither more nor less resemblance to man than the latter. Hence it came that the strange “dwellers by the Nile” actually loved both shade and death by association, and so it happened that “Full many a time They seemed half in love with easeful Death; Called him soft names in many a mused rhyme,”