The Spanish Nun

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1882 edition. Excerpt: ...like night--from land to land,' and, at uncertain intervals, wrenching him until he made rehearsal of his errors, even at the hard price of ' holding children from their play and the old men from the chimney corner' " % That craziness, as the third reader deciphers, rose out of a deeper soil than any bodily affection. It had its root in penitential sorrow. O, bitter is the sorrow to a conscientious heart when too late it discovers the depth of a love that has been trampled under foot! This mariner bad slain the creature that, on all the earth, loved him best. In the darkness of his cruel superstition he had done it, to save his human brothers from a fancied inconvenience; and yet, by that very act,of cruelty, he had himself called destruction upon their heads. The Nemesis that followed punished him through them--him that wronged, through those that wrongfully he/ sought to benefit. That spirit who watches over the sanctities of love is a strong angel--is a jealous angel and this angel it was "That loved the bird, that loved the man, That shot him with his bow," He it was that followed the cruel archer into silent and slumbering seas: "Nine fathom deep had followed him Through the realms of mist and snow." This jealous angel it was that pursued the man into noonday darkness, and the vision of dying oceans, into delirium, and, finally, (when recovered from disease,) into an unsettled mind. Such, also, had been the offence of Kate; such, also, was the punishment that now is dogging her steps. She, like the mariner, had slain the one sole creature that loved her upon the whole wide earth; she, like the mariner, for this offence, had been hunted into frost and snow--very soon will be hunted into delirium; and from that (if she...