If,
among the thousand doors which death holds open for mortal man to pass
through, ere he puts on immortality, there be one, the rarest of them
all, for broken hearts, this hapless creature found it. A self accusing
spirit bowed her to the earth, with the sharpest of all griefs--a
mother's anguish for an only child--lost to her, as gamesters lose
fortunes--thrown away by her own hand.
* * * * *
FITZMAURICE THE MAGICIAN.
"_I have lived three hundred years!_ In that time--in all that time, I
have never seen the glorious sun descend, but followed still its rolling
course through the regions of illimitable space. I have shivered on the
frozen mountains of the icy north, and fainted beneath the sultry skies of
the blazing east: the swift winds have been my viewless chariot, and on
their careering wings I have been hurried from clime to clime. But, nor
light, nor air, nor heat, nor cold, have been to me as to the rest of my
species; for I was doomed to find in their extremes a perpetual torment.
I howled, under the sharp, pinching pangs of the icy north; I panted with
agony, in the scorching fervour of the blazing east; and when mine eyes
have ached, with vain efforts, to pierce the darkness of the earth's
centre, they have been suddenly blasted with excessive and intolerable
delight.
"All the currents of human affection--all that makes the past delightful,
the present lovely, and the future coveted, were dried up within me.
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