The chaste matrons, too, and the maidens with
untasted lips, who had slept in their virgin graves apart from all
other dust, now wore a look from which the two trembling mortals
shrank, as if the unimaginable sin of twenty worlds were collected
there. The faces of fond lovers, even of such as had pined into the
tomb, because there their treasure was, were bent on one another
with glances of hatred and smiles of bitter scorn, passions that are
to devils what love is to the blest. At times, the features of those
who had passed from a holy life to heaven would vary to and fro,
between their assumed aspect and the fiendish lineaments whence they
had been transformed. The whole miserable multitude, both sinful
souls and false spectres of good men, groaned horribly and gnashed
their teeth, as they looked upward to the calm loveliness of the
midnight sky, and beheld those homes of bliss where they must never
dwell. Such was the apparition, though too shadowy for language to
portray; for here would be the moonbeams on the ice, glittering
through a warrior's breast-plate, and there the letters of a
tombstone, on the form that stood before it; and whenever a breeze
went by, it swept the old men's hoary heads, the women's fearful
beauty, and all the unreal throng, into one indistinguishable cloud
together.
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