before—“ O, friend, are you conscious, as I am, of this companionship that knits our heart-strings together?"

"I feel it, Miriam," said Donatello. "We draw one breath; we live one life!"

"Only yesterday," continued Miriam; "nay, only a short half-hour ago, I shivered in an icy solitude. No friendship, no sisterhood, could come near enough to keep the warmth within my heart. In an instant, all is changed! There can be no more loneliness!"

"None, Miriam !" said Donatello.

"None, my beautiful one!" responded Miriam, gazing in his face, which had taken a higher, almost an heroic aspect from the strength of passion. "None, my innocent one! Surely, it is no crime that we have committed. One wretched and worthless life has been sacrificed, to cement two other lives forevermore."

"Forevermore, Miriam !" said Donatello; "cemented with his blood!" The young man started at the word which he had himself spoken; it may be that it brought home, to the simplicity of his imagination, what he had not before dreamed of-the ever-increasing loathsomeness of a union that consists in guilt. Cemented with blood, which would corrupt and grow more noisome forever and forever, but bind them none the less strictly for that!

"Forget it! Cast it all behind you!" said Miriam, detecting, by her sympathy, the pang that was in his heart. "The deed has done its office, and has no existence any more."

They flung the past behind them, as she counselled, or else distilled from it a fiery intoxication, which sufficed to carry them triumphantly through those first moments of their doom. For, guilt has its moment of rapture too. The foremost result of a broken law is ever an ecstatic sense of freedom. And thus there exhaled upward (out of their dark sympathy, at the base of which lay a human corpse) a bliss, or an insanity, which the unhappy pair imagined to be well worth the sleepy innocence that was forever lost to them.

As their spirits rose to the solemn madness of the occasion, they went onward not stealthily, not fearfully-but with a stately gait and aspect. Passion lent them (as it does to meaner shapes) its brief nobility of carriage. They trod through the streets of Rome, as if they, too, were among the majestic and guilty shadows, that, from ages long gone by, have haunted the blood-stained city. And, at Miriam's suggestion, they turned aside, for the sake of treading loftily past the old site of Pompey's forum.

"For there was a great deed done here!" she said "a deed of blood, like ours! Who knows, but we may meet the high and ever-sad fraternity of Cæsar's murderers, and exchange a salutation?"

"Are they our brethren, now?" asked Donatello.

"Yes; all of them," said Miriam; "and many another, whom the world little dreams of, has been made our brother or our sister, by what we have done within this hour!"

And, at the thought, she shivered. Where, then, was the seclusion, the remoteness, the strange, lonesome Paradise, into which she and her one companion had been transported by their crime? Was there, indeed, no such refuge, but only a crowded thoroughfare and jostling throng of criminals? And was it true, that whatever hand had a blood-stain on it or had poured out poison-or strangled a babe at its birth-or clutched a grandsire's throat, he sleeping, and robbed him of his few last breaths had now the right to offer itself in fellowship with their two hands? Too certainly, that right existed. It is a terrible thought, that an individual wrong-doing melts into the great mass of human crime, and makes us who dreamed only of our own little separate sin-makes us guilty of the whole. And thus Miriam and her lover were not an insulated pair, but members of an innumerable confraternity of guilty ones, all shuddering at each other.

"But not now; not yet," she murmured to herself. "To-night, at least, there shall be no remorse!"

Wandering without a purpose, it so chanced that they turned into a street, at one extremity of which stood Hilda's tower. There was a light in her high chamber; a light, too, at the Virgin's shrine; and the glimmer of these two was the loftiest light beneath the stars. Miriam drew Donatello's arm to make him stop, and while they stood at some distance looking at Hilda's window, they beheld her approach and throw it open. She leaned far forth, and extended her clasped hands towards the sky.

"The good, pure child! She is praying, Donatello," said Miriam, with a kind of simple joy at witnessing the devoutness of her friend. Then her own sin rushed upon her, and she shouted, with the rich strength of her voice, "Pray for us, Hilda; we need it!"

Whether Hilda heard and recognized the voice we cannot tell. The window was immediately closed, and her form disappeared from behind the snowy curtain. Miriam felt this to be a token that the cry of her condemned spirit was shut out of heaven.

Sarah Helen Whitman.

BORN in Providence, R. I., 1803. DIED there, 1878.

AF

THE PORTRAIT.

[Poems by Sarah Helen Whitman. 1879.]

FTER long years I raised the folds concealing That face, magnetic as the morning's beam: While slumbering memory thrilled at its revealing, Like Memnon wakening from his marble dream.

Again I saw the brow's translucent pallor,

The dark hair floating o'er it like a plume;
The sweet, imperious mouth, whose haughty valor
Defied all portents of impending doom.

Eyes planet-calm, with something in their vision
That seemed not of earth's mortal mixture born,
Strange mythic faiths and fantasies Elysian,

And far, sweet dreams of "faery lands forlorn."

Unfathomable eyes that held the sorrow

Of vanished ages in their shadowy deeps,
Lit by that prescience of a heavenly morrow
Which in high hearts the immortal spirit keeps.

Oft has that pale, poetic presence haunted
My lonely musings at the twilight hour,
Transforming the dull earth-life it enchanted,
With marvel and with mystery and with power.

Oft have I heard the sullen sea-wind moaning
Its dirge-like requiems on the lonely shore,
Or listening to the autumn woods intoning
The wild, sweet legend of the lost Lenore;

Oft in some ashen evening of October,

Have stood entranced beside a moldering tomb

Hard by that visionary Lake of Auber,

Where sleeps the shrouded form of Ulalume;

Oft in chill, star-lit nights have heard the chiming

Of far-off mellow bells on the keen air,

And felt their molten-golden music timing

To the heart's pulses, answering unaware.

Sweet, mournful eyes, long closed upon earth's sorrow, Sleep restfully after life's fevered dream!

1870.

Sleep, wayward heart! till on some cool, bright morrow,
Thy soul, refreshed, shall bathe in morning's beam.

Though cloud and sorrow rest upon thy story,
And rude hands lift the drapery of thy pall,
Time, as a birthright, shall restore the glory,
And Heaven rekindle all the stars that fall.

THE SHADOW-LAND OF POE.

[Edgar Poe and His Critics. 1860.]

WHILE the author of Eureka, like Lucretius,

his works are, as if unconsciously, filled with an overwhelming sense of the power and majesty of Deity; they are even dark with reverential awe. His proud intellectual assumption of the supremacy of the individual soul was but an expression of its imperious longings for immortality and its recoil from the haunting phantasms of death and annihilation; while the theme of all his more imaginative writings is, as we have said, a love that survives the dissolution of the mortal body and oversweeps the grave. His mental and temperamental idiosyncrasies fitted him to come readily into rapport with psychal and spiritual influences. Many of his strange narratives had a degree of truth in them which he was unwilling to avow. In one of this class he makes the narrator say, "I cannot even now regard these experiences as a dream, yet it is difficult to say how otherwise they should be termed. Let us suppose only that the soul of man, to-day, is on the brink of stupendous psychal discoveries." Dante tells us that

-“minds dreaming near the dawn Are of the truth presageful."

Edgar Poe's dreams were assuredly often presageful and significant, and while he but dimly apprehended through the higher reason the truths which they foreshadowed, he riveted public attention upon them by the strange fascination of his style, the fine analytical temper of his intellect, and, above all, by the weird splendors of his imagination, compelling men to read and to accredit as possible truths his most marvellous conceptions. He often spoke of the imageries and incidents of his inner life as more vivid and veritable than those of his

outer experience. We find in some pencilled notes appended to a manuscript copy of one of his later poems the words, "All that I have here expressed was actually present to me. Remember the mental condition which gave rise to 'Ligeia '-recall the passage of which I spoke, and observe the coincidence." With all the fine alchemy of his subtle intellect he sought to analyze the character and conditions of this introverted life. "I regard these visions," he says, "even as they arise, with an awe which in some measure moderates or tranquillizes the ecstasy-I so regard them through a conviction that this ecstasy, in itself, is of a character supernal to the human nature-is a glimpse of the spirit's outer world." He had that constitutional determination to reverie which, according to De Quincey, alone enables a man to dream magnificently, and which, as we have said, made his dreams realities and his life a dream. His mind was indeed a "Haunted Palace," echoing to the footfalls of angels and demons. "No man," he says, "has recorded, no man has dared to record, the wonders of his inner life."

Is there, then, no significance in this "supernatural soliciting"? Is there no evidence of a wise purpose, an epochal fitness, in the appearance, at this precise era, of a mind so rarely gifted, and accessible from peculiarities of psychal and physical organization to the subtle vibrations of an ethereal medium conveying but feeble impressions to the senses of ordinary persons; a mind which, "following darkness like a dream," wandered forever with insatiate curiosity on the confines of that

seeking to solve the problem of that phantasmal Shadow-Land, which, through a class of phenomena unprecedented in the world's history, was about to attest itself as an actual plane of conscious and progressive life, the mode and measure of whose relations with our own are already recognized as legitimate objects of scientific research by the most candid and competent thinkers of our time? We assume that, in the abnormal manifestations of a genius so imperative and so controlling, this epochal significance is most strikingly apparent. Jean Paul says truly that "there is more poetic fitness, more method, a more intelligible purpose in the biographies which God Almighty writes than in all the inventions. of poets and novelists"