Alas! alas! how
do the follies of poor humanity repeat themselves in every age. The
butterfly has killed the lion, without after all meaning much harm. Ah,
that such human butterflies would take warning by the fate of Herodias'
daughter, and see how mere vanity will lead, if indulged too long and too
freely, to awful crime.
One knows the old stories,--how Herod, and Herodias, and the vain foolish
girl fell into disgrace with the Emperor, and were banished into
Provence, and died in want and misery. One knows too the old legends,
how Herodias' daughter reappears in South Europe--even in old German
legends--as the witch-goddess, fair and ruinous, sweeping for ever
through wood and wold at night with her troop of fiends, tempting the
traveller to dance with them till he dies; a name for ever accursed
through its own vanity rather than its own deliberate sin, from which may
God preserve us all, men as well as women. So two women, one wicked and
one vain, did all they could to destroy one of the noblest human beings
who ever walked this earth.
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