Salathiel Author:George Croly Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: SALATHIEL. CHAPTER I. "tarry Thou, Till I Come." "The words shot through me—I felt them like an arrow in my heart—my brain whirled —my eyes grew dim. The t... more »roops, the priests, the populace, the world passed away from before my senses like phantoms. But my mind had a horrible clearness. As if the veil that separates the visible and invisible worlds had been rent in sunder, I saw shapes and signs for which mortal language has no name. The whole expanse of the future spread under my mental gaze in dreadful vision. A preternatural light, a new power of mind seemed to have been poured into my being. I saw at once the full guilt of my crime—the fierce folly—the mad ingratitude—the desperate profanation. I lived over again in frightful distinctness every act and instant of the night of my unspeakable sacrilege. I saw, as if written with a sunbeam, the countless injuries, that in the rage of bigotry I had accumulated upon the victim; the bitter mockeries that I had devised; the cruel tauntings that my lips had taught the rabble; the pitiless malignity that had forbidden them to discover a trace of virtue where all virtue was. The bldws of the scourge still sounded in my ears. Every drop of the innocent blood rose up in judgment before me. Accursed be the night in which I fell before the tempter! Blotted out from time and eternity be the hour in which I took part with the torturers ! Every fibre of my frame quivers, every drop of my blood curdles, as I still hear the echo of the anathema that on the night of wo sprang first from my furious Vol. i.—!i lips, the self-pronounced ruin, the words of desolation, "His BLOOD BE UPON US, AND UPON OUR CHILDREN !" I had headed the multitude: where others shrank, I urged; where others pitied, I reviled, and inflamed; I scoffed at t...« less