She raised her wan hands to
the sky; all her woman's tenderness repossessed itself of her heart; and
as she again knelt down over the grave, her sobs rose audibly through
the calmed and fragrant air.
With Hermanric's corpse beneath her, with the blood-sprinkled room
behind her, with a hostile army and a famine-wasted city beyond her, it
was only through that flood of tears, that healing passion of gentle
emotions, that she rose superior to the multiplied horrors of her
situation at the very moment when her faculties and her life seemed
sinking under them alike. Fully, freely, bitterly she wept, on the
kindly and parent earth--the patient, friendly ground that once bore the
light footsteps of the first of a race not created for death; that now
holds in its sheltering arms the loved ones, whom, in mourning, we lay
there to sleep; that shall yet be bound to the farthermost of its
depths, when the sun-bright presence of returning spirits shines over
its renovated frame, and love is resumed in angel perfection at the
point where death suspended it in mortal frailness!
'Come home--your father is awaiting you--come home!' repeated the Pagan
vacantly, moving slowly away as he spoke.
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