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The anguish of death entered into the soul at the sight of that spectre, half mummy and half foetus; they approached it as does the traveller who is shown at Strasburg the daughter of an old count of Sarvenden, embalmed in her bride's dress: that childish skeleton makes one shudder, for her slender and livid hand wears the wedding-ring and her head decays enwreathed in orange-blossoms.
It was true that he entered the dreaded shades with fear, yet no spectre ever crossed his path. But perhaps that was because the thoughts of the old man were pure, or perhaps because he never entered the forest without singing a hymn in a clear brave voice. As the fisherman sat mending his nets on this fair summer eve he began to move restlessly, to glance around uneasily.
I gained it; I confronted the spectre monarchs in their sepulchre; and the same hand that grasped their shadowy rule hath seized the diadem of the mighty caliphs by the broad rushing of their imperial river. 'The world is mine: and shall I yield the prize, the universal and heroic prize, to realise the dull tradition of some dreaming priest, and consecrate a legend?
The Duke of Wellington and Sir Robert Peel probably thought that their wisest course would be to let Lord Grey and Brougham and their friends try what they could do with the monstrous spectre of reform which they had conjured up, and wait till the country had recovered its senses before again undertaking to act as ministers of the Crown.
He too, had, perhaps, sported with innocent beauty. And now the spectre of the weeping maniac haunted his visions. Soon he became one himself. The name of Juliet fortunately was not published in the journals. It was by some means incorrectly stated that the woman who attacked the king was named Margaret Nicholson, and so it remains on the page of history.
There was something awful about this old animal, with patient and laborious stupidity in every line of his plodding body, obeying still that higher intelligence which was no longer visible at his guiding-reins, and perhaps had gone out of sight forever. It had all the uncanny horror of a headless spectre advancing down the road. Jerome collected himself when the white horse came alongside. "Whoa!
The figure that presented itself to his view was the remains of his once happy friend; but so miserably altered and disguised, that his features were scarce cognisable. The florid, the sprightly, the gay, the elevated youth, was now metamorphosed into a wan, dejected, meagre, squalid spectre; the hollow-eyed representative of distemper, indigence, and despair.
He had tried eight days before to borrow a hundred thousand francs, and had failed. He had been refused, not because his property was not as much as he owed, but because it was known that property sold by a bankrupt does not bring its value. Thus it was that when the valet came in and said, "The bailiff is here," he seemed like a spectre commanding suicide.
But in the midst of his ceaseless toil the spectre of his simple wife and his former innocent life appears before him and "will not down." Is Haskalah worth the sacrifices he and his like are daily bringing on its altar? Is not the materialism of the emancipated Maskilim often greater than the medievalism of the fanatical Hasidim?
The afternoon wind blew through its open doors and ravaged rack and box as if it had been the wreck of weeks instead of minutes, and the level rays of the setting sun flashed and blazed into its windows as though fire had been added to the ruin. But even this presently faded, leaving the abandoned coach a rigid, lifeless spectre on the twilight plain.
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