This man conquered, and triumphed in the victory.
I held out my hand in that water and touched--a skeleton! What! had any
other man preceded me? I looked at it; it was the water-washed frame of
a horse,--brutes together! And death was at hand; the grasp tightened
on my breast with that acrid sense of weight and suffocation that the
redundant blood suffusing the lungs must needs produce. "The soul of the
brute goeth downward." Coward! what might not life have been? and I had
lost it!--lost it for the sting of a honey-bee!--for the contempt of a
woman! Every magnificent possibility, every immortal power, every hope
of a future, tantalizing in its grand mystery, all lost! What if that
sweeping star-seraph that men call a comet, speeding through heaven in
its lonely splendor, with nitent head, and pinions trailing with the
very swiftness and strength of its onward flight, should shudder from
its orbit, fling into star-strewn space its calm and awful glory, and
go crashing down into the fury and blackness of chaos, carrying with it
wrecks of horror, and the yelling fragments of spheres no longer choral,
but smitten with the lawless stroke of a creature regardless of its
Creator, an orb that made its solitary fate, and carried across the
order and the law of God ruin and wreck embodied?
And I had a soul;--I had flung it away; I had set my will up for my
destiny, and the one had worked out the other. But had I? When that
devilish suggestion came to me on the bank, did I entertain it? Have I
not said how I grasped at the great idea of a God, and held it with a
death-gripe in the midst of assault? How did I come in the water? I did
not plunge nor fall.
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