that its approach was relatively by degrees infinitesimal, but as the days went on, he began to derive a gray consolation from the thought that he must at length cease to exist. He would not hasten the end; he would be brave, and see the play out. Only it was all so dull! If a woman looked kindly at him, if for a moment it gave him pleasure, the next it was as an arrow in his heart. What a white splendor was vanished from his life! Where were those great liquid orbs of radiating darkness?--where was that smile with its flash of whiteness?--that form so lithe, yet so stately, so perfect in modulation?--where were those hands and feet that spoke without words, and took their own way with his heart?--those arms--? His being shook to its center. One word of tenderness and forgiveness, and all would have been his own still!--But on what terms?--Of dishonor and falsehood, he said, and grew hard again. He was sorry for Juliet, but she and not he was to blame. She had ruined his life, as well as lost her own, and his was the harder case, for he had to live on, and she had taken with her all the good the earth had for him. She had been the sole object of his worship; he had acknowledged no other divinity; she was the loveliness of all things; but she had dropped from her pedestal, and gone down in the sea that flows waveless and windless and silent around the worlds. Alas for life! But he would bear on till its winter came. The years would be as tedious as hell; but nothing that ends can be other than brief. Not willingly even yet would he fail of what work was his. The world was bad enough; he would not leave it worse than he had found it. He would work life out, that he might die in peace. Fame truly there was none for him, but his work would not be lost. The wretched race of men would suffer a little the less that he had lived. Poor comfort, if more of health but ministered to the potency of such anguish as now burrowed in him like a mole of fire! There had been a time when, in the young pathos of things, he would shut his eyes that the sunset might not wound him so sore; now, as he rode homeward into the fronting sunset, he felt nothing, cared for nothing, only ached with a dull aching through body and soul. He was still kind to his fellows, but the glow of the kindness had vanished, and truest thanks hardly waked the slightest thrill. He very seldom saw Wingfold now, and less than ever was inclined toward his doctrine; for had it not been through him this misery had come upon him? Had he not, with the confidence of all the sciences, uttered the merest dreams as eternal truths? How could poor Juliet help supposing he knew the things he asserted, and taking them for facts? The human heart was the one unreasonable thing, sighing ever after that which is not! Sprung from nothing, it yet desired a creator!--at least some hearts did so: his did not; he knew better!