It is a bitter and a sorrowful thing to mourn for the dead--to lament over those who have gone away out of this shadowy land into the brighter country, where they yet are, and shall be, all the more sure in their wonderful existence that we see them not. But to mourn for those who have never been--to behold stars fall from your horizon, the glory of whose shining was but a phantasm of your brain, a creation of your own soul; to awake suddenly from your contemplation of some noble and beautiful spirit, the fairest that ever gladdened mortal vision, and to find that it _is_ not, and _was_ not, and that the place, which in your dream was illuminated by its glorious presence, is filled by a shadowy thing of unknown nature, which you never saw before--this is the bitterest of griefs. If there is sorrow more hard than this, I bow my head to it in fear and reverence; but this is my woe, and prince of woes. Drifting from false anchorage, surrounded by spectral ships and ghostly receding shores, hopelessly driven over the treacherous sea; with no light but an indefinite twilight, sickening the faint heart with visions of shadowy haven and harbour, and false security. A world of mists--a universe of uncertain, unknown existences, which are not as you have dreamed, and among whom you must go forth alone, no longer devoutly to believe and warmly to love, but to grope darkling in the brightest noonday, to walk warily, shutting up the yearning heart within you, in jealous fear. It is hard to make this second beginning--hard to fight and struggle blindly against this sad necessity--yet the poor heart yields at last; either to put on the self-wounding mail of doubt and suspicion, or to live in dim and mournful patience, a hermit all its days. CHAPTER VIII. Oh! wherefore should I busk my heid? Oh! wherefore should I kame my hair? When my true love has me forsook, And says he’ll never loe me mair. Oh, Mart’mas wind! when wilt thou blaw And shake the dead leaves aff the tree? Oh, gentle death! when wilt thou come And take a life that wearies me?--OLD BALLAD. I took little note of how months or weeks went after that era. I lost that summer time. It has fallen entirely from the reckoning of my life, leaving only some vestiges of what looks now like incipient madness behind; for I was entirely alone; shut out as much from that ordinary communication with the world, which painfully and beneficially compels the suppression of one’s agony, as I was from all human sympathy, all kindness, all compassion. I had lost all; my dreams of a brighter home--my friends--all were gone. Hew Murray far away in India, and his sad sister Lucy alone in Murrayshaugh--to no others in the wide world could I look for any of those gentle offices which belong to friendship; and the one was thousands of miles away--the other was no less solitary, no less stricken than I.