There never probably, in the whole history of the world, has been a race of men, which entertained in their own persons a more boundless contempt of death, or assigned less value to the mere quality of life, than the warlike Normans. Not a man of them, while in the heyday of life and manhood, would have hesitated for a moment in choosing a death under shield, a death of violence and anguish, winning renown and conferring deathless honor, to the gentlest decay, the most peaceful dissolution. Not a man would have shed a tear, or shown a sign of sorrow, had he seen his favorite son, his most familiar friend, his noblest brother in arms, felled from his saddle in the mêlée, and trampled out of the very form of humanity beneath the hoofs of the charging cavalry. Not a man but would have ridden over a battlefield, gorged with carcasses and drunk with gore, without expressing a thought of terror, a sentiment beyond the victory, the glory, and the gain. But such is the sovereignty of death, in the silence and solitude of its natural gloom, stripped of the pomp and paraphernalia of funereal honors, and unadorned by the empty braveries of human praise and glory--such is the empire of humble, simple, overruling sorrow, that, as they entered the low-roofed, undecorated chamber, where lay the corpse of the neglected, despised serf--the being, while in life, scarce equal to the animals of the chase--with his nearest of kin, serfs likewise, abject, ignorant, down-trodden, and debased--in so far as man can debase God's creations--mourning in Christian sorrow over him, the nobles felt, for a moment, that their nobility was nothing in the presence of the awful dead; and that they, too, for all their pride of antique blood, for all their strength of limb and heaven-daring valor, for all their lands and lordships, must be brought down one day to the dust, like the poor slave, and go forth, as they entered this world, bearing nothing out, before one common Lord and Master, who must in the end sit in universal judgment. Such meditations are not, perhaps, very common to the great, the powerful, and the fortunate of men, in any time or place, so long as the light of this world shine about, and their ways are ways of pleasantness; but if rare always, and under all ordinary circumstances, with the chivalrous, high-hearted, and hot-headed knights of the twelfth century, they were assuredly of the rarest. Yet now so powerfully did they come over the strong minds of the two grave nobles, that they paused a moment on the threshold before entering; and Yvo de Taillebois, who was the elder man, and of deeper thoughts and higher imagination than his friend, raised his plumed bonnet from his brow, and bowed his head in silence.