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“Poh, poh, my good fellows!” said a dark-complexioned personage, who
now joined the group,–his complexion was indeed fearfully dark, and
his eyes glowed with a redder light than that of the bonfire; “be
not so cast down, my dear friends; you shall see good days yet.
There is one thing that these wiseacres have forgotten to throw into
the fire, and without which all the rest of the conflagration is
just nothing at all; yes, though they had burned the earth itself to
a cinder.”

“And what may that be?” eagerly demanded the last murderer.

“What but the human heart itself?” said the dark-visaged stranger,
with a portentous grin. “And, unless they hit upon some method of
purifying that foul cavern, forth from it will reissue all the
shapes of wrong and misery–the same old shapes or worse ones–which
they have taken such a vast deal of trouble to consume to ashes. I
have stood by this livelong night and laughed in my sleeve at the
whole business. O, take my word for it, it will be the old world
yet!”

This brief conversation supplied me with a theme for lengthened
thought. How sad a truth, if true it were, that man’s age-long
endeavor for perfection had served only to render him the mockery of
the evil principle, from the fatal circumstance of an error at the
very root of the matter! The heart, the heart, there was the little
yet boundless sphere wherein existed the original wrong of which the
crime and misery of this outward world were merely types. Purify
that inward sphere, and the many shapes of evil that haunt the
outward, and which now seem almost our only realities, will turn to
shadowy phantoms and vanish of their own accord; but if we go no
deeper than the intellect, and strive, with merely that feeble
instrument, to discern and rectify what is wrong, our whole
accomplishment will be a dream, so unsubstantial that it matters
little whether the bonfire, which I have so faithfully described,
were what we choose to call a real event and a flame that would
scorch the finger, or only a phosphoric radiance and a parable of my
own brain.