slake my thirst from yonder goblet. The tongue of Tiberius is dry with the avidity of his passion."

sinister and ferocious expression pervading every lineament, and lurking in every wrinkle. As he gazed, however, a blithe sound startled him from the An indescribable loathing entered umbrage of the boughs. Quick, lively, | into the imagination of the Bacchante jocund, to the clashing of her cymbals, even as she lay upon the grass; yet she there bounded forth an Italian maiden rose with precipitation and filled a in the garb of a Bacchante. Her feet chalice to the brim with Falernian. agile as the roe's, her eyes lustrous and Tiberius grasped it with an eager hand, defiant, her hair dishevelled, her bosom and his mouth pressed the lip of the cup heaving, her arms symmetrical as sculp. as if to drain its ruby vintage to the ture, but glowing with the roseate bottom. Suddenly, however, the eyes warmth of youth, the virgin still re- of the old man blazed with a raging joiced, as it were, in the tumult of the light; the scowl of lust was forgotten; dance. Grapes of a golden-green, the vindictiveness of a fiend shone in relieved by the ruddy-brown of their his dilated eye-balls, and, with a yell of foliage, clustered in a garland about fury, he cast the goblet into the air, her temples, and leaped in unison with crying out that the wine boiled like the her movements. Around! with her bowl of Pluto. He was writhing in raven tresses streaming abroad in ring- one of those paroxysms of rage, which lets-around! with her sandals clink-justified posterity in regarding him as a ing on the gravel to the capricious beat madman. The howling of Tiberius of her cymbals-around! with her light resounded among the verdure, as the robes flowing back from a jewelled rattle of a snake might do when it brooch above the knee singing, raises its deadly crest from its lair sparkling, undulating, circling, rust among the flowers. Quick as thought ling, the Bacchante entranced the at the first sound of those inexorable heart of the Rosicrucian. She gleam- accents, the grove was thronged with ed before him like the embodiment of the revellers. They jostled each other enthusiasm. She was the genius of in their solicitude to minister to the motion, the divinity of the dance; she cruelty of the despot; and that cruelty was Terpsichore in the grace of her was as ruthless, and as hell-born, as it movements, Euterpe in the ravishing was ingenious and appalling. sweetness of her voice. A thrill of admiration suffused with a deeper tint even the abhorred cheek of the volup-destal. For a moment, she stood tuary.

By an almost imperceptible degree, the damsel abated the ardor of her gyrations, her cymbals clashed less frequently, the song faded from her lip, the flutter of her garments ceased, the vine-fruit drooped upon her forehead. She stood before the couch pal pitating with emotion, and radiant with a divine beauty. In another instant, she had prostrated herself upon the earth, for in the decrepit monster of Capreæ she recognised the lord of the whole world-Tiberius.

"Arise, maiden of Apulia," he said, with an immediate sense that he beheld another of those innocent damsels, who were stolen from their pastoral homes on the Peninsula to become the victims of his depravity. "Arise, and

Obedient to a gesture of Tiberius, the Bacchante was placed upon a pe

before them an exquisite statue of des pair-exquisite even in the excess of her bewilderment. For a moment, she stood there stunned by the suddenness of the commotion, and frantic with the consciousness of her peril. For a moment she gazed about her for aid, wildly but, alas! vainly. No pity beamed upon her in that more horrible Gomorrah. The marble trembled under her feet-a sulphurous stench shot through its crevices-the virgin shrieked and fell forwards, scorched and blackened to a cinder. She was blasted, as if by a thunderbolt* Cagliostro

Those who are familiar with the classic historians. Instruments for the destruction of life yet more awful will see in this description no exaggeration whatever. and mysterious, were employed by many of the prede cessors, and many of the successors of Tiberius, as well as by Tiberius himself; and modern science has shown

THE VISION OF CAGLIOSTRO.

227

amphitheatre in Palestine. The whole air was refulgent with the light of a summer morning, and through the loopholes of the structure, the eye caught the blue shimmer of the Mediterranean. Banners, emblazoned with the ciphers of Rome, fluttered from the walls of the amphitheatre. Its internal circumference was thronged with a vast concourse of citizens; and, immediately

looked with horror upon the ashes of the Bacchante. He had seen youth stricken down by age; he had seen 'virtue annihilated, so to speak, at the mandate of vice; he had seen-and even his callous heart exulted at the thought--he had seen innocence snatched from pollution, when upon the very threshold of an earthly hell. While rejoicing in this reflection, he was aroused by the stertorous breathing of about the Rosicrucian, groups of foreign the emperor. The crowned demon of the island was being borne away to his palace upon the shoulders of his attendants. Although maddened by an insatiable thirst, and by a gloom that was becoming habitual, the monster lay upon his cushions as impotent as a child, in the midst of his diseases and iniquities.†

traders, habited as if for some unusual ceremony, were scattered over the arena. Expectation was evinced in every movement of the assemblage, in every murmur that floated round the benches. The worshippers were there, it seemed, and were awaiting the high-priest. That high-priest was approaching, and more than a high-priest; for Herod At the feet of the Rosicrucian were Agrippa, the tetrarch of Judea had deshuddled the bones of the virgin of cended from Jerusalem to Cæsarea, for Apulia; and the babbling of the foun- the celebration of warlike games in tains was alone audible in the solitude. honor of the Emperor Claudius, and, "Such," said the mournful Voice, as Cagliostro again felt himself carried through the darkness-"such, Balsamo, are the miseries of a debauched appetite."

AGRIPPA.

In another instant, the impostor was standing upon the floor of a gigantic

vances.

sorcerers have been latterly explained by the revelation

tions may be found by the reader in the learned work

that these devices, instead of being, as was originally conjectured, the result of black-magic, were, in reality, the effect of hydraulic, pneumatic, and mechanical contriEven the most marvellous feats of the Egyptian of natural philosophy, and a multitude of these explana"Des Science Occultes," &c., written by M. Eusebe Sal verte, and published in Paris as recently as 1843. In that remarkable volume, M. Salverte proves that natural phenomena are more startling than necromatic tricks, and that, in the words of Roger Bacon, "non igitur oportet nos magicis illusionibus uti, cum potestas philoso plica doceat operari quod sufficit." That Tiberius was capable of atrocities yet more terrific, and that murders

of the most inhuman kind were the consequence of al

most every one of his diabolical whims, those acquainted with the picturesque narrative of Suetonius already know. They will remember not only how he caused his nephew Germanicus to be poisoned by the governor of Syria, but how he ordered a fisherman to be torn in pieces by the claws of a crab, simply because he met him,

on the completion of those festivities, the deputed sovereign had consented, at the intercession of Blastus, to receive a deputation of certain Phenician ambassadors who were solicitous for an assurance of his clemency. Those envoys-the merchant princes of Tyre and Sidon-were tarrying in the public theatre of the city for the promised interview in the presence of the people

of Samaria.

Cagliostro marvelled, as he scanned. the scene before him, whether it were all a reality or a delusion of his fancy; but the lapping of the surge upon the adjacent beach, and the perfume of Oriental spices which impregnated the breezes from the Levant, and even the motes that swarmed about him like phosphoric atoms, proved that it was no juggle of a distempered imagination.

Suddenly the air was rent with acclamations; the crowd rose as if by a single impulse; trumpets sounded in the seven porches of the amphitheatre; again the plaudits shook the air like +Suetonius assures us (cap. Ixviii.) that the muscular the concussion of enthusiasm, and the strength of Tiberius Claudius Nero was, in the prime of deputation in the arena prostrated

in one of his suspicious moods, when strolling in a sequestered garden of Capres.-Sue. Tib. c. lx.

his manhood, almost as supernatural as his crimes; that

he could with his outstretched finger bore a hole throuch a sound apple (integrum malum digito tere!waret), and wound the head of a child or even a youth with a hillip (cupid pueri, vel etiam adolescentis, talitro vulneraret.)

His excesses must, however, have enervated his frame long before his death by suffocation.

themselves in the dust. Balsamo saw, at once, the reason of this rejoicing; he saw the tetrach of Judea seated upon a throne of ivory. The crown of Agrip

pa glittered upon his forehead with an unnatural brightness-it was of the purest gold, radiating from the brow in spikes, and flecked with pearls of an uncommon size. Silent-erect-inflated with pride at his own grandeur, and the adulation of the rabble, sate the King of Palestine. Silent-awe stricken-uncovered before the majesty of the representative of Claudius, stood the people of Samaria and Phenicia. Extreme beauty of an elevated and heroic character shone upon the features of Herod, although his beard was grizzled with the passage of fiftyfour winters. In the midst of the silence of the populace, the morning sun rose, almost abruptly, above the topmost arches of the edifice, and darted his beams full upon the glorious garments of Agrippa. It played in sparkles of intense lustre upon the jewels of his diadem; and upon the outer robe, which was of silver tissue woven with consummate skill and powdered with diamonds, the refraction of the sunlight produced an intolerable splendor.*The Samaritans shielded their eyes from its magnificence; they were dazzled; they were blinded; they thrill ed with admiration and astonishment. Agrippa spoke.

avenging Nemesis. He staggered from his throne, crying aloud in the extremity of his anguish; a sudden corruption had seized upon his body—he was be ing devoured by worms.

The heart of Cagliostro quailed with in him at the lamentations of the peo. ple of Samaria, as they beheld their idol smitten down by death in the midst of his surpassing pomp. Even the Jewish hagiographer tells us, with pathetic simplicity, that King Agrippa. himself wept at the wailings of the adoring mob.

Again the Alchemist found himself enveloped in darkness, again the unearthly Voice stole into his brain.

"Lo!" it said, "how the frame rots in the ermine: how the body and soul are polluted by vicious passions! Such, Balsamo, are the penalties of the lusts of the flesh."

MILTON.

Another scene then revealed itself to

the Rosicrucian, but one altogether dif ferent from those he had already wit nessed. Instead of being in an Orien tal amphitheatre, he was standing in a rural lane; instead of tumult he found tranquility; instead of regal pageanAt the first sound of his accents, He inhaled the sweet smells of clover tries an almost primitive simplicity. there was a whisper of awe among the and newly-turned mould with a zest multitude it increased--it grew louder hitherto unexperienced. The gurgling -it arose to the heavens in one proof a brook by the way-side saluted his longed and jubilant shout of adoration. "It is a God!" they cried--"it is a God that speaketh, not a man!"

As the language of that impious homage saluted the ears of Herod, his mouth curled with a smile of satisfaction, his soul expanded with an inex pressible tumult of emotions, he drank in the blasphemous flatteries of the rabble, and assumed to himself the power and the dignity of the Most High God. Yet in the very ecstacy of those sensa tions, his countenance became ghastly, his lips writhed, his eyes beheld with unutterable dismay the omen of his dissolution—the visible phantom of an

His garb, writes Josephus, "was so resplendent as to spread & horror over those that looked intently upon bim."-Lab. xix. c. 8.

and tinkled over the pebbles, with a ears, as it struggled through the rushes sound more agreeable than he ever remembered to have heard from the infirst time nature seemed to disclose her struments of court musicians. For the real loveliness to his comprehension. Every where she appeared to abound with beauties: in the bee that lit upon the nettle and sucked the honey out of its blossom; in the nettle that nodded under the weight of the bee; in the dew that dropped like a diamond from the alder-bough when the thrush alighted on its stem; in the thrush that warbled till the speckled feathers on its throat throb

"An owl," says Josephus (xix. 8); "an angel of the Lord," say the scriptures, (Acts, xii. 23,) in either case a spectral illusion.

THE VISION OF CEGLIOSTRO.

229

riveted together with iron-bands in crossbars and zigzags; the brickwork was decayed and crumbling away in blotches; the roof was low and thatched. Yet, in spite of these evidences of poverty, the scholar regarded the structure with a reverential aspect, with such an aspect as he might have presented had he contemplated the hut of Baucis and Philemon.

bed as if its heart were in its song; in the slug that trailed a silver track upon the dust; in the very dust itself that twirled in threads and circles on the ground as the wind swerved round the corner of the hedgerow. Cagliostro was entranced with the most novel and pleasurable emotions, as he strolled on towards the building he had already observed. From the elevation of the ground which he was traversing, his The threshold of this obscure edifice glance roved with admiration over a formed of itself a bower of greenery, wide and diversified extent of country; thickly covered with the blooms of the over a prospect richly wooded and honey-suckle. Under the porch was teeming with vegetation; over orchards seated a man of a most venerable counladen with fruit and knee-deep in grass; tenance. He was muffled in a gray coat over fields of barley bristling with gold- of the coarsest texture, and his legs been ripeness; over distant mills, churn-ing crossed, a worsted stocking and a ing the water into foam, and driving slipper of untanned leather betrayed gusts of meal out through the open the meanness of his under garments. doorway; over meadows where the sheep His hair, brilliant with a whiteness like cropped the cool herbage, and the cat- that of milk, was parted in the centre tle lay in the sunshine sleeping; over of his forehead, and fell over his shoulvillage steeples, over homesteads brown ders in those negligent curls called with age, or hid amongst the verdure. oreilles de chien, which became fashThe worlding scanned the profusion of ionable long afterwards, during the days the panorama with an amazement that of the French Directory. Had the Alwas exquisite from its newness. He chemist remained profoundly ignorant marvelled at the charms that strewed as to the identity of the old man, he the earth in such abundance, at the must still have observed with interest, almost unnumbered forms and colors of features which were equally characterher vitality, at the wonderful harmony ised by the pensiveness of the student that subsisted amidst all those various and the paleness of the valetudinarian. hues and shapes. Never had the joys He knew, however, instinctively, as he derivable from the sense of vision ap- had done upon the two preceding ocpeared of so much value as now that he casions, that he beheld a personage of gazed into the deep and delicious mag. illustrious memory. And he knew nificence of nature. His sight, with rightly, for it was Milton. While the a sort of luxurious abandonment, great plague was desolating the mestrayed over the contrasts, and penetra-tropolis, he had escaped from his resited into the distances of the landscape; dence in the Artillery Walk, and sought his bosom swelled with the conscious- security from the contagion by a temponess of a sympathy with that creation of which he felt himself to be but a kindred unit, or, at best, a sentient

atom.

rary sojourn in Buckinghamshire.

Opposite the immortal sage stood a person of about the same years, but of a very different deportment-it was the It was while absorbed in these sensa- dearest of his few friends, and the most tions, that Cagliostro paused before the ardent of his many worshippers, Richrustic, dwelling-house towards which ardson. The latter was leaning his steps had been involuntarily direct- against the trunk of a great maple-tree ed. The building was situated at a that grew close to the parlor-lattice, few paces from the pathway. There stretching forth its enormous branches was nothing about it to arrest the at- in all directions, and mingling its fotention of a passer-by, except, perhaps, liage with the smoke that issued from an appearance of extreme but pic- the chimney. Richardson had been turesque humility. The walls were reading aloud but a moment before,

from a volume of Boccaccio; he had from misfortunes-and to invest with a placed the book, however, upon the sublime air the figure of that old man window-sill, in obedience to a move- huddled in that old gray coat. Cagment from his companion, and contin- liostro gazed with profound interest ued, with his arms folded and his eye- upon Milton as the rolling melody of lids closed, a silent and almost inani- Pindar streamed into his ears, when mate portion of the domestic group. suddenly the song ceased, and the face The quietude which ensued was so con- of the singer was raised to the res tagious that Cagliostro remarked with plendent light of the heavens. Alas! a feeling of listlessness, the details those eyes turned vacantly in their sockand accessories of the spectacle-the ets-those eyes which had once looked silk curtains of rusty green festooned so sorrowfully on the sightless Galileo before the open window, the tobacco-those eyes which had mourned over pipe lying among the manuscripts upon the ashes of Lycidas, and rained upon the table, even the slouched-hat hang them tears transmuted by poetry into ing from the back of an arm-chair. a shower of precious stones! The The rambling meditations of Balsamo misery of his blindness recurred to were soon concentrated upon a loftier Milton himself at that same instant. theme, by the voice of Milton singing A cloud of grief descended upon his in a subdued tone the antistrophe of a countenance. He experienced one of favorite ode of Pindar. As the noble those poignant feelings of regret which, words of the Greek lyrist rolled with in our own day, occasionally oppress an indescribable gusto from the lips of the heart. of Augustin Thierry-for Milton, it seemed to the Rosicrucian with the sensibility of a poet he knew that he had never before comprehended that the hour was beautiful. Never the true euphony of the language. And had Cagliostro seen human face express the visage of the old bard responded to such exquisite but patient suffering; it the strain of Pindar; it was illumined seemed to be listening to the loveliness with a certain majesty of expression of the earth; it seemed to be inhaling that imparted additional dignity to a the glories of nature, as it were, through countenance at all times beaming with those channels which were not oblitewisdom. In appreciating the Pagan rated. The stirring of the leaves, the poet, the poet of Christianity appeared scent of the woodbine, the pattering of to glow with enthusiasm like that which the winged seeds of the maple upon entranced his whole soul in the mo- the pages of Boccaccio, the fitful twit ments of his own superb inspiration.* Nor was the grandeur of the head diminished in any manner by the unpoetical proportions of the body, for according to the acknowledgement of his most partial biographer, Richardson, the stature of Milton was so much below the ordinary height, and so much beyond the ordinary bulk, that he might almost be described as "short and thick." Yet, notwithstanding these peculiarities of the frame, an august radiance seemed to envelope the brow -a brow, hoary alike from years and

*It is impossible for any one devoted to the study of "Paradise Lost" of "Comus," even of "Sampson Agonistes," and especially of "Il Pensoroso" and "L'Allegro," to doubt that their writer was carried away at times by the cstrum, or divine afflatus, although Dr. Johnson discredits "these bursts of light, and involutions of darkness, these transient and involuntary excursions and retrocessions of inventiou."-See Lives of the Poets, vol. i. p. 188.

tering of the birds-all ascended as offerings of recompense to the blind man, but they only tended to enhance the sense of his affliction. He caught but the skirts of the goddess of that creation whose glories he had chanted in his celestial epic; and yet no murmur escaped from the dejected lip of Milton!

Again darkness surrounded the Rosicrucian-again the awful voice resounded in his imagination.

"Behold!" it said "the sorrows of the great and virtuous when the light is quenched: behold the divine preroga tive of those who see! And know, Balsamo, that such are the boons thou hast contemned-such are the faculties thou hast polluted."