’Twas the chill of things sepulchral, ’twas the ancient chill of death, ’Twas the chill of nothingness, And my shadow, From the moon’s pale light out-floating, Walked there lonely, Walked there lonely, Lonely walked the pale plain o’er, And your shadow grown more lovely, Graceful, languid, As upon that night of spring-time—fleeting spring of long ago; As that night time filled with murmurings of sweetness, With faint perfumes, and the music dim of birds’ wings, Reached my shadow and swept with it, Reached my shadow and swept with it, Reached my shadow and swept with it—O! twin shadows interlacing! O the interlacing shadows of twin bodies reuniting with the shadows of their souls! O those interlacing shadows which are seeking, still are seeking, Through all night times, on, forever, for each other in their tears! In Bogotá, city of old churches, patrician pride, grave gray stone palaces, the room in which Silvá killed himself was found filled with books, in many tongues, collections of precious perfumes, and rare orchids. How vastly learned was Tertullian! How eloquent! And how bronze muscled was his prose! As I read, I recall sharply old, resonant bronzes of Han, black and polished archaic pottery from fabulous dead cities upon the slopes of the Andes, in Peru, such as that fluent painter and distinguished scientist and explorer, A. Hyatt Verrill, discovered, where in the long black night of time forgotten civilizations flowered then disappeared, and tides of Spanish conquest and exploration rose and fell, the black marble of the Baiæan pleasure-palaces of Tiberius Caesar, and black pearls from the Indian Ocean. In truth Tertullian’s prose is black and splendid. It glows with the magic light of poignant drowned moons in perished Egyptian midnights, and the pictured onyx pendants that chilled the cruel breasts of Herodias. It moves me tremendously. And what power to swing the great sentence, then make it humbly sinuous, simple, and supple! Hear him: “O tardy messengers! O sleepy despatches, through whose fault Cybele had not an earlier knowledge of the Imperial decease, that the Christians might have no occasion to ridicule a goddess so unworthy!...” “And yet the Romans have never done such homage to the Fates which gave them Carthage against the purpose and the will of Juno, as to the abandoned harlot Larentina. It is not undoubted that not a few of your gods have reigned on earth as men.”