CHAPTER XXXII.—ANOTHER OLD LETTER.
Love! if thy destined sacrifice am I,
Come, slay thy victim, and prepare thy fires;
Plunged in thy depths of mercy let me die
The death which every soul that lives desires.
Madame Guyon=.
‘I AM writing these lines in my bedroom in the house of the Widow Gran, in the village of Ober-Ammergau. They are the last you will receive from me for a long time; perhaps the last I shall ever send you, for more and more, as each day advances, I feel that my business with the world is done.
‘What brought me hither I know not. I am sure it was with no direct intention of witnessing what so many deem a mere mummery or outrage on religion; but after many wanderings hither and thither, I found myself in the neighbourhood, and whether instinctively or of set purpose, approaching this lonely place.
‘As I have more than once told you, I have of late, ever since my past trouble, been subject to a kind of waking nightmare, in which all natural appearances have assumed a strange unreality, as of shapes seen in dreams; and one characteristic of these seizures has been a curious sense within my own mind that, vivid as such appearances seemed, I should remember nothing of them on actually awaking. A wise physician would shake his head and murmur “diseased cerebration;” nor would his diagnosis of my condition be less gloomy, on learning that my physical powers remain unimpaired, and seem absolutely incapable of fatigue. I eat and drink little; sleep less; yet I have the strength of an athlete still, or so it seems.