Louis Lambert — Honoré de Balzac, trans. Katharine Prescott Wormeley

The pastor, Wilfrid, and Minna were all three excited to alarm at going to the house of the extraordinary being they proposed to question. To each of them the Swedish castle was magnified into the scene of a stupendous spectacle, like those of which the composition and color are so skilfully arranged by poets, where the actors, though imaginary to men, are real to those who are beginning to enter into thep. 107 spiritual world. On the seats of that amphitheatre the pastor beheld arrayed the dark legions of doubt, his gloomy ideas, his vicious syllogisms in argument; he called up the various philosophical and religious sects, ever contentious, and all embodied in the shape of a fleshless system, as lean as the figure of Time as imagined by man—the old mower who with one hand raises the scythe, and in the other carries a meagre world, the world of human life.

Wilfrid saw there his first illusions and his last hopes; he imagined human destiny incarnate there and all its struggles; religion and its triumphant hierarchies.

Minna vaguely found heaven there, seen through a vista; love held up a curtain embroidered with mystical figures, and the harmonious sounds that fell on her ears increased her curiosity. Hence this evening was to them what the supper at Emmaus was to the three travellers, what a vision was to Dante, what an inspiration was to Homer; to them, too, the three aspects of the world were to be revealed, veils rent, doubts dispelled, darkness lightened. Human nature in all its phases, and awaiting illumination, could find no better representatives than this young girl, this man, and these two elders, one of them learned enough to be sceptical, the other ignorant enough to believe. No scene could be simpler in appearance or more stupendous in fact.

On entering, shown in by old David, they found Seraphita standing by the table, on which were spread the various items constituting a Tea, a meal which takes the place in the north of the pleasures of wine-drinking, reserved for southern lands. Nothing certainly betrayed in her—or in him—a wondrous being who had the power of

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_ appearing under two distinct forms, nothing that showed the various forces she could command. With a homely desire to make her three guests comfortable, Seraphita bid David to feed the stove with wood.

‘‘Good-evening, neighbors,’’ said she. ‘Dear Pastor ‘Becker, you did well to come; you see me alive, perhaps, for the last time. This winter has killed me.—Be seated, pray,’’ she added to Wilfrid.—‘‘ And you, Minna, sit there,” and she pointed to an armchair near the young man. ‘‘You have brought your work, I see. Did you find out the stitch. The pattern is very pretty. For whom is it to be? For your father or for this gentleman?’’ and she turned to Wilfrid. ‘‘We must not allow him to leave without some remembrance of the damsels of Norway.”’

‘‘Then you were in pain again yesterday ?’’ asked Wilfrid.

“That is nothing,’’ she replied. ‘‘Such pain makes me glad; it is indispensable to escape from life.’

‘*Then you are not afraid of dying?’’ said the minister, smiling, for he did not believe in her illness. :

‘‘No, dear Pastor; there are two ways of dying—to some death means victory, to some it is defeat.”

‘**And you think you have won?’’ said Minna.

‘Ido not know,’’ said she. ‘Perhaps it is only a step more.’’

The milky radiance of her brow seemed to fade, her eyes | fell under her lids, which slowly closed. This simple circumstance distressed the three inquirers, who sat quite still. The pastor was the boldest.

‘‘My dear girl,’’ said he, ‘‘you are candor itself; you are also divinely kind. I want more of you this evening than the dainties of your tea-table. If we may believe what some people say, you know some most wonderful

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