Page:Undivine Comedy - Zygmunt Krasiński, tr. Martha Walker Cook.djvu/55

 Rh with second or spiritual sight. Entirely blind, consequently surrounded by perpetual darkness, it mattered not to him if the light of day or the gloom of midnight was upon the earth; and in his rayless wanderings he had made his way into the dungeons, sepulchres, and vaults which were lying far below the foundations of the castle, and which had for centuries served as places of torture, punishment, and death for the enemies of his long and noble line. In these secret charnel-houses were buried the bodies of the oppressed, while in the haughty tombs around and above them lay the bones of their oppressors. The unfortunate and fragile boy, the last scion of a long line of ancestry, had there met the thronging and complaining ghosts of past generations. Burdened with these dreadful secrets, when his vanquished father seeks him to embrace him for the last time, he shudderingly hints to him of fearful knowledge, and induces him to follow him into the subterranean caverns. He then recounts to him the scenes which are passing before his open vision among the dead. The spirits of those who had been chained, tortured, oppressed, or victimized by his ancestors appear before him, complaining of past cruelties. They form a mystic tribunal to try their old masters and oppressors; the scenes of the dreadful Day of Judgment pass before him; the awe-struck and loving boy at last recognizes his own father among the criminals; he is dragged to that fatal bar, he sees him wring his hands in anguish, he hears his dreadful groans as he is given over to the fiends for torture,—he hears his mother's voice calling him above, but, unwilling to desert his father in his anguish, he falls to the earth in a deep and long fainting fit, while the wretched father hears his own doom pronounced by that dread but unseen tribunal: "Because thou hast loved nothing but thyself, revered nothing but thyself and thine own thoughts, thou art damned to all eternity!"

It is true this scene is very brief, but, rapid as the lightning's flash, it lasts long enough to scathe and blast; — breaking the darkness but to show the surrounding horror, to deepen into despair the fearful gloom. Although of bald and severe simplicity, it is sublime and terrible. It is so concise that our hearts actually long for more,