The last of the guests had left the palace before I ventured to descend. The vases of perfumes still breathed in the hall of the banquet; the alabaster lamps were still burning; but excepting the attendants who waited on my steps at a distance, and whose fixed figures might have been taken for statues, there was not a living being near me of the laughing and joyous crowd that had so lately glittered, danced, and smiled within those sumptuous walls. Yet what was this but a picture of the common rotation of life? Or by a yet more immediate moral, what was it but a picture of the desertion that might be coming upon me and mine? I sat down to extinguish my sullen philosophy in wine. But no draft that ever passed the lip could extinguish the fever that brooded on my spirit. I dreaded that the presence of my family might force out my secret, and lingered with my eyes gazing, without sight, on the costly covering of the board. [Sidenote: A Beautiful Group] A sound of music from an inner hall to which Miriam and her daughters had retired, aroused me. I stood at the door, gazing on the group within. The music was a hymn with which they closed the customary devotions of the day. But there was something in its sound to me that I had never felt before. At the moment when those sweet voices were pouring out the gratitude of hearts as innocent and glowing as the hearts of angels, a scene of horror might be acting. The husband of Salome might be struggling with the Roman sword; nay, he might be lying a corpse under the feet of the cavalry, that before morn might bring the news of his destruction in the flames that might startle us from our sleep, and the swords that might pierce our bosoms. And what beings were those thus appointed for the sacrifice? The lapse of even a few years had perfected the natural beauty of my daughters. Salome’s sparkling eye was more brilliant; her graceful form was molded into more easy elegance, and her laughing lip was wreathed with a more playful smile. Never did I see a creature of deeper witchery. My Esther, my noble and dear Esther, who was perhaps the dearer to me from her inheriting a tinge of my melancholy, yet a melancholy exalted by genius into a charm, was this night the leader of the song of holiness. Her large uplifted eye glowed with the brightness of one of the stars on which it was fixed. Her hands fell on the harp in almost the attitude of prayer, and the expression of her lofty and intellectual countenance, crimsoned with the theme, told of a communion with thoughts and beings above mortality. The hymn was done, the voices had ceased, yet the inspiration still burned in her soul; her hands still shook from the chords’ harmonies, sweet, but of the wildest and boldest brilliancy; bursts and flights of sound, like the rushing of the distant waterfall at night, or the strange, solemn echoes of the forest in the first swell of the storm.