Over the long anguish of that woeful life the veil of self-oblivion had closed for ever! He had been dismissed by Alaric, but he had not returned to the city whither he was bidden.

Throughout the night he had wandered about the lonely suburbs, striving in secret and horrible suffering for the mastery of his mind.

There did the overthrow of all his hopes from the Goths expand rapidly into the overthrow of the whole intellect that had created his aspirations.

There had reason burst the bonds that had so long chained, perverted, degraded it! At length, wandering hither and thither, he had dragged the helpless body, possessed no longer by the perilous mind, to the farm-house garden in which he now stood, gazing alternately at the upturned sods of the chieftain's grave and the red gleam of the fire as it glowed from the dreary room through the gap of the shattered door.
His faculties were fatally disordered rather than utterly destroyed.
His penetration, his firmness, and his cunning were gone; but a wreck of memory, useless and unmanageable--a certain capacity for momentary observation still remained to him.

The shameful miscarriage in the tent of Alaric, which had overthrown his faculties, had passed from him as an event that never happened, but he remembered fragments of his past existence--he still retained a vague consciousness of the ruling purpose of his whole life.
These embryo reflections, disconnected and unsustained, flitted to and fro over his dark mind as luminous exhalations over a marsh--rising and sinking, harmless and delusive, fitful and irregular.