Page:Tales of humour and romance translated by Holcroft.djvu/209

 we bear for half a century, and longed to return to bis lost Heaven. The evening sun attracted his congenial soul. His shattered and wounded breast exhausted him with pain. He went out with the glow of evening upon his pale cheek, to the church-yard, that green background of life, where the material forms of those lovely souls which he had once released, had been successively deposited. He placed himself with sorrowful longing upon the yet naked grave of his departed bride, and gazed at the setting sun. He looked too at his own afflicted frame, and thought, thou too wouldst have been lying here, distracted bosom, no longer causing pain, had I not raised thee from death. Here he reflected upon the sad life of man, and the palpitations of his own wounded bosom showed him the sorrows with which man purchases his virtue and his death; sorrows which he rejoiced to have spared the noble soul whose body he animated. Human virtue deeply affected him, and he wept from his ceaseless love for man, who, amid the urgent cravings of his own necessities, under the lowering clouds which overshadow and darken the paths of life, turns not away his eye from the high day-star of duty, but stretches forth his generous arm through the darkness, towards every mourning fellow creature, round whom nothing but hope glimmers, like the sun sinking in the old