(17) Vide the original play, of which there is a curious and very
  obsolete translation. They kept silence till the morning was dawning, and a faint light
streamed through the closed shutters. Then the Wanderer raised his heavy
eyes, and fixed them on Melmoth. “Your ancestor has come home,” he said;
“his wanderings are over!--What has been told or believed of me is now
of light avail to me. The secret of my destiny rests with myself. If all
that fear has invented, and credulity believed of me be true, to what
does it amount? That if my crimes have exceeded those of mortality, so
will my punishment. I have been on earth a terror, but not an evil to
its inhabitants. None can participate in my destiny but with his own
consent--_none have consented_--none can be involved in its tremendous
penalties, but by participation. I alone must sustain the penalty. If I
have put forth my hand, and eaten of the fruit of the interdicted tree,
am I not driven from the presence of God and the region of paradise, and
sent to wander amid worlds of barrenness and curse for ever and ever? “It has been reported of me, that I obtained from the enemy of souls a
range of existence beyond the period allotted to mortality--a power to
pass over space without disturbance or delay, and visit remote regions
with the swiftness of thought--to encounter tempests without the _hope_
of their blasting me, and penetrate into dungeons, whose bolts were as
flax and tow at my touch. It has been said that this power was accorded
to me, that I might be enabled to tempt wretches in their fearful hour
of extremity, with the promise of deliverance and immunity, on condition
of their exchanging situations with me. If this be true, it bears
attestation to a truth uttered by the lips of one I may not name, and
echoed by every human heart in the habitable world. “No one has ever exchanged destinies with Melmoth the Wanderer. _I have
traversed the world in the search, and no one, to gain that world, would
lose his own soul!_--Not Stanton in his cell--nor you, Monçada, in the
prison of the Inquisition--nor Walberg, who saw his children perishing
with want--nor--another”--

He paused, and though on the verge of his dark and doubtful voyage, he
seemed to cast one look of bitter and retrospective anguish on the
receding shore of life, and see, through the mists of memory, one form
that stood there to bid him farewell. He rose--“Let me, if possible,
obtain an hour’s repose. Aye, repose--sleep!” he repeated, answering the
silent astonishment of his hearers’ looks, “my existence is still
human!”--and a ghastly and derisive smile wandered over his features for
the last time, as he spoke. How often had that smile frozen the blood of
his victims! Melmoth and Monçada quitted the apartment; and the
Wanderer, sinking back in his chair, slept profoundly. He slept, but
what were the visions of his last earthly slumber? The Wanderer’s Dream. He dreamed that he stood on the summit of a precipice, whose downward
height no eye could have measured, but for the fearful waves of a fiery
ocean that lashed, and blazed, and roared at its bottom, sending its
burning spray far up, so as to drench the dreamer with its sulphurous
rain. The whole glowing ocean below was alive--every billow bore an
agonizing soul, that rose like a wreck or a putrid corse on the waves of
earth’s oceans--uttered a shriek as it burst against that adamantine
precipice--sunk--and rose again to repeat the tremendous experiment! Every billow of fire was thus instinct with immortal and agonizing
existence,--each was freighted with a soul, that rose on the burning
wave in torturing hope, burst on the rock in despair, added its eternal
shriek to the roar of that fiery ocean, and sunk to rise again--in vain,
and--for ever! Suddenly the Wanderer felt himself flung half-way down the precipice. He
stood, in his dream, tottering on a crag midway down the precipice--he
looked upward, but the upper air (for there was no heaven) showed only
blackness unshadowed and impenetrable--but, blacker than that blackness,
he could distinguish a gigantic outstretched arm, that held him as in
sport on the ridge of that infernal precipice, while another, that
seemed in its motions to hold fearful and invisible conjunction with the
arm that grasped him, as if both belonged to some being too vast and
horrible even for the imagery of a dream to shape, pointed upwards to a
dial-plate fixed on the top of that precipice, and which the flashes of
that ocean of fire made fearfully conspicuous. He saw the mysterious
single hand revolve--he saw it reach the appointed period of 150
years--(for in this mystic plate centuries were marked, not hours)--he
shrieked in his dream, and, with that strong impulse often felt in
sleep, burst from the arm that held him, to arrest the motion of the
hand. In the effort he fell, and falling grasped at aught that might save
him. His fall seemed perpendicular--there was nought to save him--the
rock was as smooth as ice--the ocean of fire broke at its foot! Suddenly a groupe of figures appeared, ascending as he fell. He
grasped at them successively;--first Stanton--then Walberg--Elinor
Mortimer--Isidora--Monçada--all passed him,--to each he seemed in his
slumber to cling in order to break his fall--all ascended the precipice. He caught at each in his downward flight, but all forsook him and
ascended. His last despairing reverted glance was fixed on the clock of
eternity--the upraised black arm seemed to push forward the hand--it
arrived at its period--he fell--he sunk--he blazed--he shrieked! The
burning waves boomed over his sinking head, and the clock of eternity
rung out its awful chime--“Room for the soul of the Wanderer!”--and the
waves of the burning ocean answered, as they lashed the adamantine
rock--“There is room for more!”----The Wanderer awoke. CHAPTER XXXIX. And in he came with eyes of flame,
    The fiend to fetch the dead. SOUTHEY’S _Old Woman of Berkeley_. Melmoth and Monçada did not dare to approach the door till about noon. They then knocked gently at the door, and finding the summons
unanswered, they entered slowly and irresolutely. The apartment was in
the same state in which they had left it the preceding night, or rather
morning; it was dusky and silent, the shutters had not been opened, and
the Wanderer still seemed sleeping in his chair. At the sound of their approach he half-started up, and demanded what was
the hour. They told him. “My hour is come,” said the Wanderer, “it is an
hour you must neither partake or witness--the clock of eternity is about
to strike, but its knell must be unheard by mortal ears!” As he spoke
they approached nearer, and saw with horror the change the last few
hours had wrought on him. The fearful lustre of his eyes had been
deadened before their late interview, but now the lines of extreme age
were visible in every feature.