hues of feminine beauty, now resembled the flitting and pale ghost of some maiden who has died for love, as it is seen indistinctly and by moonlight by her perjured lover.
'Stay, spirit!' said the youth, emboldened by his success in the subterranean dome, 'thy kindness must not leave me, as one encumbered with a weapon he knows not how to wield. Thou must teach me the art to read and to understand this volume; else what avails it me that I possess it?'
But the figure of the White Lady still waned before his eye, until it became an outline as pale and indistinct as that of the moon when the winter moyning is far advanced, and ere she had ended the following chant she was entirely invisible:
'Alas! alas!
Not ours the grace
These holy characters to trace:
Idle forms of painted air.
Not to us is given to share
The boon bestow'd on Adam's race!
With patience bide,
Heaven will provide
The fitting time, the fitting guide.'
The form was already gone, and now the voice itself had melted away in melancholy cadence, softening, as if the being who spoke had been slowly wafted from the spot where she had commenced her melody.
It was at this moment that Halbert felt the extremity of the terror which he had hitherto so manfully suppressed. The very necessity of exertion had given him spirit to make it, and the presence of the mysterious being, while it was a subject of fear in itself, had nevertheless given him the sense of protection being near to him. It was when he could reflect with composure on what had passed, that a cold tremor shot across his limbs, his hair bristled, and he was afraid to look around lest he should find at his elbow something more frightful than the first vision. A breeze arising suddenly realized the beautiful and wild idea of the most imaginative of our modern bards[1]—
It fann'd his cheek, it raised his hair,
Like a meadow gale in spring;
It mingled strangely with his fears,
Yet it felt like a welcoming.
- ↑ Coleridge.
