Page:What will he do with it.djvu/599

Rh he had ceased—he was gone—lost in the close gloom of a neighboring thicket, his hurried headlong path betrayed by the rustle of mournful boughs swinging back with their withered leaves.

we slowly recover from the tumult and passion of some violent distress, a peculiar stillness falls upon the mind, and the atmosphere around it becomes, in that stillness, appallingly clear. We knew not, while wrestling with our woe, the extent of its ravages. As a land the day after a flood, as a field the day after a battle, is the sight of our own sorrow, when we no longer have to stem its raging, but to endure the destruction it has made. Distinct before Caroline Montfort's vision stretched the waste of her misery—the Past, the Present, the Future—all seemed to blend in one single Desolation. A strange thing it is how all time will converge itself, as it were, into the burningglass of a moment! There runs a popular superstition that it is thus in the instant of death; that our whole existence crowds itself on the glazing eye, a panorama of all we have done on earth, just as the soul restores to the earth its garment. Certes, there are hours in our being, long before the last and dreaded one, when this phenomenon comes to warn us that, if memory were always active, time would be never gone. Rose before this woman—who, whatever the justice of Darrell's bitter reproaches, had a nature lovely enough to justify his anguish at her loss