"I descended from the cheerful day into two ranges, one below another, of dismal, awful, horrible stone cells. They were quite dark. Each had a loophole in its massive wall, where, in the old time, every day a torch was placed--I dreamed--to light the prisoners within, for half an hour. The captives, by the glimmering of these brief rays, had scratched and cut inscriptions in the blackened vaults. I saw them. For their labour with the rusty nail's point had outlived their agony and them, through many generations. "One cell I saw in which no man remained for more than four-and-twenty hours; being marked for dead before he entered it. Hard by another, and a dismal one, whereto, at midnight, the Confessor came--a monk brown-robed and hooded--ghastly in the day and free bright air, but in the midnight of that murky prison, Hope's extinguisher and Murder's herald. I had my foot upon the spot where, at the same dread hour, the shriven prisoner was strangled; and struck my hand upon the guilty door--low-browed and stealthy--through which the lumpish sack was carried out into a boat, and rowed away, and drowned where it was death to cast a net." (_Pictures from Italy: An Italian Dream._)--T. [100] . . . . . . "Into that hideous den, With one blow of the axe, admitted light again."--T. [101] Silvio Pellico (1788-1854) was imprisoned in Milan and Venice from 1820 to 1822 and at the Spielberg, near Brünn, from 1822 to 1830. His _Mie Prigioni_ had only lately been published (1833) and Chateaubriand was much struck with them. During his previous journey to Italy, in a letter dated Basle, 17 May 1833, he wrote to Madame Récamier: "Here I am at Basle, safe and sound. You have seen that fine river pass which is going, for a moment, to bring news of me to you in France. Travelling always gives me back my strength, sentiment and thought; I am very busy writing _a new prologue to a_ BOOK. I nave read the whole of Pellico, cursorily. I am delighted with it; I should like to write an account of that work, the saintliness of which will prevent its success with our revolutionaries, who are free after Fouché's fashion. Are you not enchanted with _Zanze sotto i Piombi?_ And the little deaf-and-dumb person? And Schiller, the old gaoler, and the religious conversations through the window, and our poor Maroncelli? And that poor young wife of the _sopr'intendente_, who dies so sweetly? And the return to beautiful Italy?"--B. [102] Bruno, near which the Spielberg stands, is the capital of Moravia.--T. [103] Maria Christina Josephs Johanna Antonia of Austria, Duchess of Saxe-Teschen (1742-1798), married to Albert Duke of Saxe-Teschen in 1766. The Archduchess Maria Christina's monument, by Canova, is in the church of the Augustines in Vienna.--T.