Thomas Malthus - "Nature and Progress of Rent"

Gotthold Ephraim Lessing - "Nathan the Wise"

Ella Wheeler Wilcox - "Poems of Cheer"

Ludwig van Beethoven, edited by Friedrich Kerst - "Beethoven: the Man and the Artist, as Revealed in his own Words"

New Philadelphia Book Publisher Highlights Local Talent
Book and Publishing News from Publishers Newswire(tm)

Looking for Child to be on Cover of a New Book, 'The Model Child'
PHILADELPHIA, Pa. -- The Philadelphia literary world will celebrate the launch of two new players today, April 10th: Kay Square Press, a new publishing company focused on Philadelphia-area artists, their stories, and their art; and Kay Square's first release, 'With the Rich and Mighty: Emlen Etting of Philadelphia' (ISBN: 978-0-9815129-0-7), a critical biography by Kenneth C. Kaleta.

FlatSigned Press Alleges Don Imus Remarks Damage Legacy of President Gerald R. Ford
NEW YORK, N.Y. -- Nathan Yungerberg, an accomplished model scout and professional child photographer is launching a nation-wide casting call to find the cover model for his highly anticipated book release, 'The Model Child: A Parents Guide to the Child Modeling Industry' (ISBN: 978-0-9817018-0-6).

Books: Antonina

W >> Wilkie Collins >> Antonina




He raised his face while she spoke; his features assumed a deeper
mournfulness and hopelessness of expression; he looked upon her in
ominous silence, and laid his trembling fingers on her arm to detain
her, when she hurriedly attempted to quit the room.


'Do not forbid me to depart,' she anxiously pleaded. 'To me every
corner in the garden is known; for it was my possession in our happier
days--our last hopes rest in the garden, and I must search through it
without delay! Bear with me,' she added, in low and melancholy
tones--'bear with m e, dear father, in all that I would now do! I have
suffered, since we parted, a bitter affliction, which clings dark and
heavy to all my thoughts--there is no consolation for me but the
privilege of caring for your welfare--my only hope of comfort is in the
employment of aiding you!'

The old man's hand had pressed heavier on her arm while she addressed
him; but when she ceased it dropped from her, and he bent his head in
speechless submission to her entreaty.

For one moment she lingered, looking on him silent as himself; the next,
she left the apartment with hasty and uncertain steps.

On reaching the garden, she unconsciously took the path leading to the
bank where she had once loved to play secretly upon her lute and to look
on the distant mountains reposing in the warm atmosphere which summer
evenings shed over their blue expanse. How eloquent was this little
plot of ground of the quiet events now for ever gone by!--of the joys,
the hopes, the happy occupations, which rise with the day that
chronicles them, and pass like that day, never to return the same!--
which the memory alone can preserve as they were, and the heart can
never resume but in a changed form, divested of the presence of the
companion of the incident of the departed moment, which formed the charm
of the past and makes the imperfection of the present.

Tender and thronging were the remembrances which the surrounding
prospect called up, as the sad mistress of the garden looked again on
her little domain! She saw the bank where she could never more sit to
sing with a renewal of the same feelings which had once inspired her
music; she saw the drooping flowers that she could never restore with
the same childlike enjoyment of the task which had animated her in
former hours! Young though she still was, the emotions of the youthful
days that were gone could never be revived as they had once existed! As
waters they had welled up, and as waters they had flowed forth, never to
return to their source! Thoughts of these former years--of the young
warrior who lay cold beneath the heavy earth--of the desponding father
who mourned hopeless in the room above--gathered thick at her heart as
she turned from her flower-beds--not, as in other days, to pour forth
her happiness to the music of her lute, but to search laboriously for
the sustenance of life.

At first, as she stooped over those places in the garden where she knew
that fruits and vegetables had been planted by her own hand, her tears
blinded her. She hastily dashed them away, and looked eagerly around.

Alas! others had reaped the field from which she had hoped abundance!
In the early days of the famine Numerian's congregation had entered the
garden, and gathered for him whatever it contained; its choicest and its
homeliest products were alike exhausted; withered leaves lay on the
barren earth, and naked branches waved over them in the air. She
wandered from path to path, searching amid the briars and thistles,
which already cast an aspect of ruin over the deserted place; she
explored its most hidden corners with the painful perseverance of
despair; but the same barrenness spread around her wherever she turned.
On this once fertile spot, which she had entered with such joyful faith
in its resources, there remained but a few poor decayed roots, dropped
and forgotten amid tangled weeds and faded flowers.

She saw that they were barely sufficient for one scanty meal as she
collected them and returned slowly to the house. No words escaped her,
no tears flowed over her cheeks when she reascended the steps--hope,
fear, thought, sensation itself had been stunned within her from the
first moment when she had discovered that, in the garden as in the
house, the inexorable famine had anticipated the last chances of relief.

She entered the room, and, still holding the withered roots, advanced
mechanically to her father's side. During her absence his mental and
bodily faculties had both yielded to wearied nature--he lay in a deep,
heavy sleep.


Her mind experienced a faint relief when she saw that the fatal
necessity of confessing the futility of the hopes she had herself
awakened was spared her for a while. She knelt down by Numerian, and
gently smoothed the hair over his brow; then she drew the curtain across
the window, for she feared even that the breeze blowing through it might
arouse him.

A strange, secret satisfaction at the idea of devoting to her father
every moment of the time and every particle of the strength that might
yet be reserved for her; a ready resignation to death in dying for him--
overspread her heart, and took the place of all other aspirations and
all other thoughts.

She now moved to and fro through the room with a cautious tranquillity
which nothing could startle; she prepared her decayed roots for food
with a patient attention which nothing could divert. Lost, through the
aggravated miseries of her position, to recent grief and present
apprehension, she could still instinctively perform the simple offices
of the woman and the daughter, as she might have performed them amid a
peaceful nation and a prosperous home. Thus do the first-born
affections outlast the exhaustion of all the stormy emotions, all the
aspiring thoughts of after years, which may occupy, but which cannot
absorb, the spirit within us; thus does their friendly and familiar
voice, when the clamour of contending passions has died away in its own
fury, speak again, serene and sustaining as in the early time, when the
mind moved secure within the limits of its native simplicity, and the
heart yet lay happy in the pure tranquillity of its first repose!

The last scanty measure of food was soon prepared; it was bitter and
unpalatable when she tasted it--life could barely be preserved, even in
the most vigorous, by provision so wretched; but she set it aside as
carefully as if it had been the most precious luxury of the most
abundant feast.

Nothing had changed during the interval of her solitary employment--her
father yet slept; the gloomy silence yet prevailed in the street. She
placed herself at the window, and partially drew aside the curtain to
let the warm breezes from without blow over her cold brow. The same
ineffable resignation, the same unnatural quietude, which had sunk down
over her faculties since she had entered the room, overspread them
still. Surrounding objects failed to impress her attention;
recollections and forebodings stagnated in her mind. A marble composure
prevailed over her features. Sometimes her eyes wandered mechanically
from the morsels of food by her side to her sleeping father, as her one
vacant idea of watching for his service, till the feeble pulses of life
had throbbed their last, alternately revived and declined; but no other
evidences of bodily existence or mental activity appeared in her. As
she now sat in the half-darkened room, by the couch on which her father
reposed--her features pale, calm, and rigid, her form enveloped in cold
white drapery--there were moments when she looked like one of the
penitential devotees of the primitive Church, appointed to watch in the
house of mourning, and surprised in her saintly vigil by the advent of
Death.

Time flowed on--the monotonous hours of the day waned again towards
night; and plague and famine told their lapse in the fated highways of
Rome. For father and child the sand in the glass was fast running out,
and neither marked it as it diminished. The sleeper still reposed, and
the guardian by his side still watched; but now her weary gaze was
directed on the street, unconsciously attracted by the sound of voices
which at length rose from it at intervals, and by the light of the
torches and lamps which appeared in the great palace of the senator
Vetranio, as the sun gradually declined in the horizon, and the fiery
clouds around were quenched in the vapours of the advancing night.
Steadily she looked upon the sight beneath and before her; but even yet
her limbs never moved; no expression relieved the blank, solemn
peacefulness of her features.

Meanwhile, the soft, brief twilight glimmered over the earth, and showed
the cold moon, poised solitary in the starless heaven; then, the
stealthy darkness arose at her pale signal, and closed slowly round the
City of Death!


CHAPTER 22. THE BANQUET OF FAMINE.

Of all prophecies, none are, perhaps, so frequently erroneous as those
on which we are most apt to venture in endeavouring to foretell the
effect of outward events on the characters of men. In no form of our
anticipations are we more frequently baffled than in such attempts to
estimate beforehand the influence of circumstance over conduct, not only
in others, but also even in ourselves. Let the event but happen, and
men, whom we view by the light of our previous observation of them, act
under it as the living contradictions of their own characters. The
friend of our daily social intercourse, in the progress of life, and the
favourite hero of our historic studies, in the progress of the page,
astonish, exceed, or disappoint our expectations alike. We find it as
vain to foresee a cause as to fix a limit for the arbitrary
inconsistencies in the dispositions of mankind.

But, though to speculate upon the future conduct of others under
impending circumstances be but too often to expose the fallacy of our
wisest anticipations, to contemplate the nature of that conduct after it
has been displayed is a useful subject of curiosity, and may perhaps be
made a fruitful source of instruction. Similar events which succeed
each other at different periods are relieved from monotony, and derive
new importance from the ever-varying effects which they produce on the
human character. Thus, in the great occurrence which forms the
foundation of our narrative, we may find little in the siege of Rome,
looking at it as a mere event, to distinguish it remarkably from any
former siege of the city--the same desire for glory and vengeance,
wealth and dominion, which brought Alaric to her walls, brought other
invaders before him. But if we observed the effect of the Gothic
descent upon Italy on the inhabitants of her capital, we shall find
ample matter for novel contemplation and unbounded surprise.

We shall perceive, as an astonishing instance of the inconsistencies of
the human character, the spectacle of a whole people resolutely defying
an overwhelming foreign invasion at their very doors, just at the period
when they had fallen most irremediably from the highest position of
national glory to the lowest depths of national degradation; resisting
an all-powerful enemy with inflexible obstinacy, for the honour of the
Roman name, which they had basely dishonoured or carelessly forgotten
for ages past. We shall behold men who have hitherto laughed at the
very name of patriotism, now starving resolutely in their country's
cause; who stopped at no villainy to obtain wealth, now hesitating to
employ their ill-gotten gains in the purchase of the most important of
all gratifications--their own security and peace. Instances of the
unimaginable effect produced by the event of the siege of Rome on the
characters of her inhabitants might be drawn from all classes, from the
lowest to the highest, from patrician to plebeian; but to produce them
here would be to admit too long an interruption in the progress of the
present narrative. If we are to enter at all into detail on such a
subject, it must be only in a case clearly connected with the actual
requirements of our story; and such a case may be found, at this
juncture, in the conduct of the senator Vetranio, under the influence of
the worst calamities attending the blockade of Rome by the Goths.

Who, it may be asked, knowing the previous character of this man, his
frivolity of disposition, his voluptuous anxiety for unremitting
enjoyment and ease, his horror of the slightest approaches of affliction
or pain, would have imagined him capable of rejecting in disdain all the
minor chances of present security and future prosperity which his
unbounded power and wealth might have procured for him, even in a
famine-stricken city, and rising suddenly to the sublime of criminal
desperation, in the resolution to abandon life as worthless the moment
it had ceased to run in the easy current of all former years? Yet to
this determination had he now arrived; and, still more extraordinary, in
this determination had he found others, of his own patrician order, to
join him.


The reader will remember his wild announcement of his intended orgie to
the Prefect Pompeianus during the earlier periods of the siege; that
announcement was now to be fulfilled. Vetranio had bidden his guests to
the Banquet of Famine. A chosen number of the senators of the great
city were to vindicate their daring by dying the revellers that they had
lived; by resigning in contempt all prospect of starving, like the
common herd, on a lessening daily pittance of loathsome food; by making
their triumphant exit from a fettered and ungrateful life, drowned in
floods of wine, and lighted by the fires of the wealthiest palace of
Rome!

It had been intended to keep this frantic determination a profound
secret, to let the mighty catastrophe burst upon the remaining
inhabitants of the city like a prodigy from heaven; but the slaves
intrusted with the organisation of the suicide banquet had been bribed
to their tasks with wine, and in the carelessness of intoxication had
revealed to others whatever they heard within the palace walls. The
news passed from mouth to mouth. There was enough in the prospect of
beholding the burning palace and the drunken suicide of its desperate
guests to animate even the stagnant curiosity of a famishing mob.

On the appointed evening the people dragged their weary limbs from all
quarters of the city towards the Pincian Hill. Many of them died on the
way; many lost their resolution to proceed to the end of their journey,
and took shelter sullenly in the empty houses on the road; many found
opportunities for plunder and crime as they proceeded, which tempted
them from their destination; but many persevered in their purpose--the
living dragging the dying along with them, the desperate driving the
cowardly before them in malignant sport, until they gained the palace
gates. It was by their voices, as they reached her ear from the street,
that the fast-sinking faculties of Antonina had been startled, though
not revived; and there, on the broad pavement, lay these citizens of a
fallen city--a congregation of pestilence and crime--a starving and an
awful band!

The moon, brightened by the increasing darkness, now clearly illuminated
the street, and revealed, in a narrow space, a various and impressive
scene.

One side of the roadway in which stood Vetranio's palace was occupied,
along each extremity, as far as the eye could reach at night, by the
groves and outbuildings attached to the senator's mansion. The palace
grounds, at the higher and farther end of the street--looking from the
Pincian Gate--crossed it by a wide archway, and then stretched backward,
until they joined the trees of the little garden of Numerian's abode.
In a line with this house, but separated from it by a short space, stood
a long row of buildings, let out floor by floor to separate occupants,
and towering to an unwieldy altitude; for in ancient Rome, as in modern
London, in consequence of the high price of land in an over-populated
city, builders could only secure space in a dwelling by adding
inconveniently to its height. Beyond these habitations rose the trees
surrounding another patrician abode; and beyond that the houses took a
sudden turn, and nothing more was visible in a straight line but the
dusky, indefinite objects of the distant view.


The whole appearance of the street before Vetranio's mansion, had it
been unoccupied by the repulsive groups now formed in it, would have
been eminently beautiful at the hours of which we now write. The nobly
symmetrical frontage of the palace itself, with its graceful succession
of long porticoes and colossal statues, contrasted by the picturesquely
irregular appearance of the opposite dwelling of Numerian and the lofty
houses by its side; the soft, indistinct masses of foliage running
parallel along the upper ends of the street, terminated and connected by
the archway garden across the road, on which was planted a group of tall
pine-trees, rising in gigantic relief against the transparent sky; the
brilliant light streaming across the pavement from Vetranio's gaily-
curtained windows, immediately opposed by the tranquil moonlight which
lit the more distant view--formed altogether a prospect in which the
natural and the artificial were mingled together in the most exquisite
proportions--a prospect whose ineffable poetry and beauty might, on any
other night, have charmed the most careless eye and exalted the most
frivolous mind. But now, overspread as it was by groups of people gaunt
with famine and hideous with disease; startled as it was, at gloomy
intervals, by contending cries of supplication, defiance, and despair--
its brightest beauties of Nature and Art appeared but to shine with an
aspect of bitter mockery around the human misery which their splendour
disclosed.

Upwards of a hundred people--mostly of the lowest orders--were
congregated before the senator's devoted dwelling. Some few among them
passed slowly to and fro in the street, their figures gliding shadowy
and solemn through the light around them; but the greater number lay on
the pavement before the wall of Numerian's dwelling and the doorways of
the lofty houses by its side. Illuminated by the full glare of the
light from the palace windows, these groups, huddled together in the
distorted attitudes of suffering and despair, assumed a fearful and
unearthly appearance. Their shrivelled faces, their tattered clothing,
their wan forms, here prostrate, there half-raised, were bathed in a
steady red glow. High above them, at the windows of the tall houses,
now tenanted in every floor by the dead, appeared a few figures (the
mercenary guardians of the dying within) bending forward to look out
upon the palace opposite--their haggard faces showing pale in the clear
moonlight. Sometimes their voices were heard calling in mockery to the
mass of people below to break down the strong steel gates of the palace,
and tear the full wine-cup from its master's lips. Sometimes those
beneath replied with execrations, which rose wildly mingled with the
wailing of women and children, the moans of the plague-stricken, and the
supplications of the famished to the slaves passing backwards and
forwards behind the palace railings for charity and help.

In the intervals, when the tumult of weak voices was partially lulled,
there was heard a dull, regular, beating sound, produced by those who
had found dry bones on their road to the palace, and were pounding them
on the pavement, in sheltered places, for food. The wind, which had
been refreshing during the day, had changed at sunset, and now swept up
slowly over the street in hot, faint gusts, plague-laden, from the East.
Particles of the ragged clothing on some prostrate forms lying most
exposed in its course waved slowly to and fro, as it passed, like
banners planted by Death on the yielding defences of the citadel of
Life. It wound through the open windows of the palace, hot and
mephitic, as if tainted with the breath of the foul and furious words
which it bore onward into the banqueting-hall of the senator's reckless
guests. Driven over such scenes as now spread beneath it, it derived
from them a portentous significance; it seemed to blow like an
atmosphere exuded from the furnace-depths of centre earth, breathing
sinister warnings of some deadly convulsion in the whole fabric of
Nature over the thronged and dismal street.

Such was the prospect before the palace, and such the spectators
assembled in ferocious anxiety to behold the destruction of the
senator's abode. Meanwhile, within the walls of the building, the
beginning of the fatal orgie was at hand.

It had been covenanted by the slaves (who, during the calamities in the
besieged city, had relaxed in their accustomed implicit obedience to
their master with perfect impunity), that, as soon as the last labours
of preparation were completed, they should be free to consult their own
safety by quitting the devoted palace. Already some of the weakest and
most timid of their numbers might be seen passing out hastily into the
gardens by the back gates, like engineers who had fired a train, and
were escaping ere the explosion burst forth. Those among the menials
who still remained in the palace were for the greater part occupied in
drinking from the vases of wine which had been placed before them, to
preserved to the last moment their failing strength.


The mockery of festivity had been extended even to their dresses--green
liveries girt with cherry-coloured girdles arrayed their wasted forms.
They drank in utter silence. Not the slightest appearance of revelry or
intoxication prevailed among their ranks. Confusedly huddled together,
as if for mutual protection, they ever and anon cast quick glances of
suspicion and apprehension upon some six or eight of the superior
attendants of the palace, who walked backwards and forwards at the outer
extremity of the hall occupied by their comrades, and occasionally
advancing along the straight passages before them to the front gates of
the building, appeared to be exchanging furtive signals with some of the
people in the street. Reports had been vaguely spread of a secret
conspiracy between some of the principal of the slaves and certain
chosen ruffians of the populace, to murder all the inmates of the
palace, seize on its treasures, and, opening the city gates to the
Goths, escape with their booty during the confusion of the pillage of
Rome. Nothing had as yet been positively discovered; but the few
attendants who kept ominously apart from the rest were unanimously
suspected by their fellows, who now watched them over their wine-cups
with anxious eyes. Different as was the scene among the slaves still
left in the palace from the scene among the people dispersed in the
street, the one was nevertheless in its own degree as gloomily
suggestive of some great impending calamity as the other.

The grand banqueting-hall of the palace, prepared though it now was for
festivity, wore a changed and melancholy aspect.

The massive tables still ran down the whole length of the noble room,
surrounded by luxurious couches, as in former days, but not a vestige of
food appeared upon their glittering surfaces. Rich vases, flasks, and
drinking-cups, all filled with wine, alone occupied the festal board.
Above, hanging low from the ceiling, burnt ten large lamps,
corresponding to the number of guests assembled, as the only procurable
representatives of the hundreds of revellers who had feasted at
Vetranio's expense during the brilliant nights that were now passed for
ever. At the lower end of the room, beyond the grand door of entrance,
hung a thick black curtain, apparently intended to conceal mysteriously
some object behind it. Before the curtain burnt a small lamp of yellow
glass, raised upon a high gilt pole, and around and beneath it, heaped
against the side walls, and over part of the table, lay a various and
confused mass of rich objects, all of a nature more or less inflammable,
and all besprinkled with scented oils. Hundreds of yards of gorgeously
variegated hangings, rolls upon rolls of manuscripts, gaudy dresses of
all colours, toys, utensils, innumerable articles of furniture formed in
rare and beautifully inlaid woods, were carelessly flung together
against the walls of the apartment, and rose high towards its ceiling.

On every part of the tables not occupied by the vases of wine were laid
gold and jewelled ornaments which dazzled the eye by their brilliancy;
while, in extraordinary contrast to the magnificence thus profusely
displayed, there appeared in one of the upper corners of the hall an old
wooden stand covered by a coarse cloth, on which were placed one or two
common earthenware bowls, containing what my be termed a 'mash' of
boiled bran and salted horseflesh. Any repulsive odour which might have
arisen from this strange compound was overpowered by the various
perfumes sprinkled about the room, which, mingling with the hot breezes
wafted through the windows from the street, produced an atmosphere as
oppressive and debilitating, in spite of its artificial allurements to
the sense of smell, as the air of a dungeon or the vapours of a marsh.