Thus jumping and prancing, All together go dancing Adown life's giddy cave; Nor living, nor loving, But dizzily roving Through dreams to a grave. There below 'tis yet worse: Earth's flowers and its clay Roof a gloomier day, Hide a still deeper curse. Ring then, ye cymbals, enliven this dream! Ye horns shout a fiercer, more vulture-like scream! And frisk caper skip prance dance yourselves out of breath! For your life is all art, Love has given you no heart: So hurrah till you plunge into bottomless death. He had ended, and was standing by the window. Then she came into the opposite chamber, lovely, as he had never yet seen her: her brown hair floated freely, and played in wanton ringlets about the whitest of necks; she was but lightly clad, and seemed as if she meant to finish some little household matters at this late hour of the night before she went to bed: for she placed two candles in two corners of the room, set the green cloth on the table to rights, and withdrew again. Emilius was still sunk in his sweet dreams, and gazing on the image which his beloved had left in his mind, when to his horrour the frightful, the scarlet old woman walkt through the chamber: the gold on her head and breast glared ghastlily as it threw back the light. She had vanisht again. Was he to believe his eyes? Was it not some delusive phantom of the night that his own feverish imagination had conjured up before him? But no! she returned, still more hideous than before, with a long grey and black mane flying wildly and haggardly about her breast and back. The beauteous maiden followed her, pale, stiff; her lovely bosom was all bared, but her whole form was like a marble statue. Betwixt them they led the sweet little child, crying and clinging imploringly to the fair maiden, who lookt not down upon it. The child lifted up and claspt its little beseeching hands, and stroakt the pale neck and cheeks of the marble beauty. But she held it fast by the hair, and in the other hand a silver basin. Then the old woman growled, and pulled out a long knife, and drew it across the white neck of the child. Here something crawled forth from behind that they seemed not to perceive, or it must have struck them with the same thrilling terrour as Emilius. A serpent curled its loathsome neck, scale after scale, lengthening and still lengthening, out of the darkness, and stoopt down over the child, whose lifeless limbs hung from the old woman's arms: its black tongue lickt up the spirting red blood, and a green sparkling eye shot over into the eye, and brain, and heart of Emilius, who instantly dropt on the ground. He was senseless when found by Roderick some hours after. * * * * *