INTRODUCTION who is on the uncurbed passion, Every every selfish pleasure, every licentious energy of humanity, and all its tyrannous weakness, go before the sordid mistress
KNOWEST thou
that old queen of the world
march always and wearies never
?
of our tearful valley, and, scythe in hand, these indefatigable
That queen is old as labourers reap their eternal harvest. but her skeleton is concealed in the wreckage of
time,
women's beauty, which she abstracts from their youth and Her skull is adorned with dead tresses that are not her own. Spoliator of crowned heads, she is embellished with the plunder of queens, from the star-begemmed hair of Berenice to that, white without age, which the executioner sheared from the brow of Marie Antoinette. Her livid and frozen body is clothed in polluted garments and
their love.
Her bony hands, covered with winding-sheets. and diadems hold chains, sceptres and crossbones, rings, When she goes by, doors open of themjewels and ashes. tattered
selves; she passes through walls; she penetrates to the she surprises the extortioners of the poor cabinets of kings ;
she sits down at their board, at their songs with her gumless out their wine, grins pours teeth, takes the place of the lecherous courtesan hidden be-
in their
most secret orgies
;
She delights in the vicinity of sleeping voluptuaries she seeks their caresses as if she hoped to grow warm in their embrace, but she freezes all those whom she hind their curtains. ;
At times, notwithstandwould think her seized one with ing, frenzy she no longer she runs if her feet are too slow, she spurs stalks slowly touches and herself never kindles.
;
;
;
a pale horse, and charges all breathless through multitudes. Murder rides with her on a red charger ; shaking his mane of smoke, fire flies
before her with wings of
scarlet 175
and