And my
city of the dead melted away. And lo! we stood in the midst of a great
market-place; and I knew it to be the market-place in which the children
had sat who said to the other children:
"We have piped unto you, and ye have not danced; we have mourned unto you,
and ye have not lamented."
And to my misery, I saw that the faces of my fathers and brothers, my
mothers and sisters, had not grown nobler in the country of the dead, in
which I had thought them safe and shining. Cares, as of this world, had so
settled upon them, that I could hardly recognize the old likeness; and the
dim forms of the ideal glory which I had reproduced in my marble busts,
had vanished altogether. Ah me! my world of the dead! my city of
treasures, hid away under the locks and bars of the unchangeable! Was
there then no world of realities?--only a Vanity Fair after all? The
glorious women went sweeping about, smiling and talking, and buying and
adorning, but they were glorious no longer; for they had common thoughts,
and common beauties, and common language and aims and hopes; and
everything was common about them.
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