Languages & literature > Aurus clavus, or, The adventures of a gold trinket, supposed to have been written by itself

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waiting to bear me to its silvery bosom. Haste,
away—haste, away—haste, away.” With this
she sprang out of bed, and scaled the rocky
height. Her parents’ fearful apprehensions
of what they had all along dreaded, and
what she dreaded herself, from her bypast ex¬
pressions to her brother, were now realized in
all their fulness, and she was now become
what the heart saddens to contemplate—a
maniac.
I will not tire the reader with recapitulating
her wanderings and mutterings to herself, from
which sometimes her brother would glean a few
detached sparks of reason, when they were im¬
mediately swallowed up in the heterogeneous
mass of broken exclamations and reveries
which followed. But reason had not regained
her sovereign sway, and the young and gentle
child who had grown up under her parents
fondling eye, as something
“ Like a new existence to their hearts,”
was now the cause of more sorrow to them
than if she had been laid in silence in the
grave.
From what I could afterwards gather from
my master, whose grief was inexpressible for his