University of Virginia Library

EARTH DARKENS HEAVEN.

The student sat in his lonely cell. The hour
was silent as the grave, and a faint cresset, hung
from the side of a massive pillar, rough with age
and worn by time, flung its faint and scanty beams
over the face of the Neophyte, while the farther
recesses of the solitary home were wrapt in gloom
and shadow.

Adrian sat upon a bench of stone, projecting from
the dark grey wall, with his head drooped low upon
his breast, his right hand lay clenched upon
his knee, and the left drooping heavily by his side,
while the fingers of the hand carelessly entwined
a beaded rosary, which fell to the earth, with the
holy cross resting neglected upon the floor of
stone.

The dark grey eyes of the student glared fixedly
from beneath the eyebrows set together in a
frown, the thin lips tightly compressed, quivered
and trembled with a wild nervous movement,
while over his youthful face and open brow, a
deathly paleness rested like a veil, and the lamp-beams
tinted with a ruddy light the folds of his
dark robe, heaved upwards by the throbbings of
thought, that awoke the demon within his breast.

“I have seen her!” were the words that broke
murmuringly from his half closed lips—but oh,
how changed and hollow was his voice, since you
heard it last in the Cathedral aisle—“I have seen
the Beauty of Florence—The Rose of Ellarini!
I have seen her, beautiful and peerless as a vision
—I have sat by her side, have drank the glance
of her full dark eye, and looked upon the glow
of her cheek! These fingers have trembled with
hers, as they ran, all alive with music, along the
chords of the breathing harp! I have seen her
—and in my heart is hell, and in my brain is
fire!”

He paused, and his hands were clasped wildly
across his breast, while the strained sinews seemed
bursting from the skin with the wild effort.
And then gazing upward with a look full of utter
abandonment of soul, and in a voice made thrilling
by the despair of a soul, that sinks to night,
within the sight of Heaven, in a voice hollow and
ghastly, yet broken ever and anon, by tones of
pathos, that would have thrilled a heart of stone
to hear, he exclaimed, raising his hands on high—

“Oh, God—no longer mine—where now is my
Religion? My beautiful religion of dreams and
shadows? My faith of light? My belief of holy
love and hallowed hope? Where are they now?
Where the calm soul, and the heart that erewhile
knew no care? Where is now my hope—my
heaven—my life? Gone—gone—all gone!