“Light as a lime‐bush, that receives Some wandering bird among its leaves.” No sooner, however, had I passed through, than the din, with which the gates clashed together again, was such as might have awakened death itself. It seemed as if every echo, throughout that vast, subterranean world, from the Catacombs of Alexandria to Thebes’s Valley of Kings, had caught up and repeated the thundering sound. Startled, however, as I was, not even this supernatural clangour could divert my attention from the light that now broke upon me—soft, warm, and welcome as are the stars of his own South to the mariner who has been wandering through the seas of the north. Looking for the source of this splendour, I saw, through an archway opposite, a long illuminated alley, stretching away as far as the eye could reach, and fenced, on one side, with thickets of odoriferous shrubs, while, along the other, extended a line of lofty arcades, from which the light, that filled the whole area, issued. As soon, too, as the din of the deep echoes had subsided, there stole gradually on my ear a strain of choral music, which appeared to come, mellowed and sweetened in its passage, through many a spacious hall within those shining arcades. Among the voices I could distinguish some female tones, towering high and clear over all the rest, and forming the spire, as it were, into which the harmony tapered, as it rose. So excited was my fancy by this sudden enchantment, that—though never had I caught a sound from the young Egyptian’s lips,—I yet persuaded myself that the voice I now heard was hers, sounding highest and most heavenly of all that choir, and calling to me, like a distant spirit out of its sphere. Animated by this thought, I flew forward to the archway, but found, to my mortification, that it was guarded by a trellis‐work, whose bars, though invisible at a distance, resisted all my efforts to force them. While occupied in these ineffectual struggles, I perceived, to the left of the archway, a dark, cavernous opening, which seemed to lead in a direction parallel to the lighted arcades. Notwithstanding my impatience, however, the aspect of this passage, as I looked shudderingly into it, chilled my very blood. It was not so much darkness, as a sort of livid and ghastly twilight, from which a damp, like that of death‐vaults, exhaled, and through which, if my eyes did not deceive me, pale, phantom‐like shapes were, at that very moment, hovering. Looking anxiously round, to discover some less formidable outlet, I saw, over the vast folding‐gates through which I had just passed, a blue, tremulous flame, which, after playing for a few seconds over the dark ground of the pediment, settled gradually into characters of light, and formed the following words:— You, who would try Yon terrible track, To live, or to die, But ne’er to look back— You, who aspire To be purified there, By the terrors of Fire, Of Water, and Air,—