190 THE LOST JAGER. 



starting from their sockets, while his fingers clutched the sharp edges of 

 the rock until they were wet with blood, he listened in the intense agony 

 of terror to the sounds which, after a long interval, rose like the voice of 

 death, from the darkness and solitude below. Again all was silent 

 still he listened he stirred not, moved not, he scarcely breathed he 

 felt that kind of trance which falls on the spirit under the stroke of some 

 unexpected calamity, of a magnitude which the imagination cannot 

 grasp. The evil stalks before our glassy eyes, dim, and misty, and 

 shapeless, yet terrible terrible ! He had just escaped one danger, but 

 that escape, in the alternative before him, scarcely seemed a blessing. 

 Death ! and to die thus ! and to die now ! by the slow, graduated torture 

 of thirst and starvation, almost within sight of the cottage of his des- 

 tined bride. Thoughts like these passed hurriedly and convulsively 

 through his mind, and he lay in the sick apathy of despair, when we 

 feel as if the movement of a limb would be recalling the numbed sense 

 of pain, and adding acuteness to its pangs. At length, with a violent 

 effort, he sprung upon his feet. He ran along the ledge, leaping many 

 an intervening chasm, from which even he would at another moment 

 have shrunk. His hurried and oppressed breathing approached almost 

 to a scream, as he sought in vain for a projection in the smooth rock, 

 by which, at whatever risk, he might reach the summit. Alas ! there 

 was none. He stood where but the vulture and the eagle had ever 

 been, and from which none but they could escape. He was now at the 

 very extremity of his narrow resting-place, and there was nothing before 

 him but the empty air. How incredulous we are when utter hopelessness 

 is the alternative. 



Once more he returned once more he examined every spot which 

 presented the slightest trace of a practicable passage, once more in vain. 

 He threw himself on the rock, his heart seemed ready to burst, but the 

 crisis of his agony was come, and he wept like a child. 



How often, when madness is burning in the brain, have tears left the 

 soul placid and resigned, like the calm twilight melancholy of a summer's 

 eve, when the impending thunder-cloud has dissolved into a shower. 

 Fritz wept aloud, and long and deep were the sobs which shook every 

 fibre of his strong frame : but they ceased, and he looked up in the face 

 of the placid moon, hopeless, and yet not in despair, and his breathing 

 was as even and gentle as when he gazed up towards her on yfistereve, 

 from the rustic balcony of Netty's cottage. Aye, though he thought of 

 that eve when, her cheek reclined on his bosom, they both sat in the still 

 consciousness of happiness, gazing on the blue glaciers, and the ever- 

 lasting and unchanging snow-peaks. He had no hope but he felt not 

 despair the burning fangs of the fiend no longer clutched his heart- 

 strings. He sat and gazed over pine forest and grey crag, and the frozen 

 and broken billows of the glaciers, and the snows of the Wetterhom, 

 with their unbroken wilderness of pure white, glistening in the moon- 

 light, and far, far beneath him, the little dusky cloudlets dreaming 

 across the valley, and he could trace in the misty horizon the dim out- 

 line of the Faulhorn, and he knew that at its base, was one heart that 

 beat for him as woman's heart alone can beat, and yet he was resigned. 



The moon neared to her setting, but just before she went down a 

 black scroll of cloud stretched across her disk. It rose higher and higher, 

 and became darker and darker, until one half of the little stars which 

 were coming forth in their brightness, rejoicing in the absence of her, by 



