The Witch of Prague | Page 5

shivered from
head to foot, and his fingers convulsively grasped the yielding sable on
which they lay.
She was there, the woman he had sought so long, whose face he had
not found in the cities and dwellings of the living, neither her grave in
the silent communities of the dead. There, before the uncouth
monument of dark red marble beneath which Tycho Brahe rests in
peace, there she stood; not as he had seen her last on that day when his
senses had left him in the delirium of his sickness, not in the freshness
of her bloom and of her dark loveliness, but changed as he had dreamed
in evil dreams that death would have power to change her. The warm
olive of her cheek was turned to the hue of wax, the soft shadows
beneath her velvet eyes were deepened and hardened, her expression,
once yielding and changing under the breath of thought and feeling as a
field of flowers when the west wind blows, was now set, as though for
ever, in a death-like fixity. The delicate features were drawn and
pinched, the nostrils contracted, the colourless lips straightened out of
the lines of beauty into the mould of a lifeless mask. It was the face of a
dead woman, but it was her face still, and the Wanderer knew it well; in
the kingdom of his soul the whole resistless commonwealth of the
emotions revolted together to dethrone death's regent--sorrow, while
the thrice-tempered springs of passion, bent but not broken, stirred
suddenly in the palace of his body and shook the strong foundations of
his being.

During the seconds that followed, his eyes were riveted upon the
beloved head. Then, as the Creed ended, the vision sank down and was
lost to his sight. She was seated now, and the broad sea of humanity hid
her from him, though he raised himself the full height of his stature in
the effort to distinguish even the least part of her head- dress. To move
from his place was all but impossible, though the fierce longing to be
near her bade him trample even upon the shoulders of the throng to
reach her, as men have done more than once to save themselves from
death by fire in crowded places. Still the singing of the hymn continued,
and would continue, as he knew, until the moment of the Elevation. He
strained his hearing to catch the sounds that came from the quarter
where she sat. In a chorus of a thousand singers he fancied that he
could have distinguished the tender, heart-stirring vibration of her tones.
Never woman sang, never could woman sing again, as she had once
sung, though her voice had been as soft as it had been sweet, and tuned
to vibrate in the heart rather than in the ear. As the strains rose and fell,
the Wanderer bowed his head and closed his eyes, listening, through
the maze of sounds, for the silvery ring of her magic note. Something
he heard at last, something that sent a thrill from his ear to his heart,
unless indeed his heart itself were making music for his ears to hear.
The impression reached him fitfully, often interrupted and lost, but as
often renewing itself and reawakening in the listener the certainty of
recognition which he had felt at the sight of the singer's face.
He who loves with his whole soul has a knowledge and a learning
which surpass the wisdom of those who spend their lives in the study of
things living or long dead, or never animate. They, indeed, can
construct the figure of a flower from the dried web of a single leaf, or
by the examination of a dusty seed, and they can set up the scheme of
life of a shadowy mammoth out of a fragment of its skeleton, or tell the
story of hill and valley from the contemplation of a handful of earth or
of a broken pebble. Often they are right, sometimes they are driven
deeper and deeper into error by the complicated imperfections of their
own science. But he who loves greatly possesses in his intuition the
capacities of all instruments of observation which man has invented
and applied to his use. The lenses of his eyes can magnify the
infinitesimal detail to the dimensions of common things, and bring

objects to his vision from immeasurable distances; the labyrinth of his
ear can choose and distinguish amidst the harmonies and the discords
of the world, muffling in its tortuous passages the reverberation of
ordinary sounds while multiplying a hundredfold the faint tones of the
one beloved voice. His whole body and his whole intelligence form
together an instrument of exquisite sensibility whereby the perceptions
of his inmost soul are