Is't so? I can no longer what I would
No longer draw back at my liking! I
Must do the deed because I thought of it.
. . . . . .
What is thy enterprise,--thy aim, thy object?
Hast honestly confessed it to thyself?
O bloody, frightful deed!
. . . . . .
Was that my purpose when we parted?
O God of Justice!--COLERIDGE: Wallenstein.

We need scarcely say that one of the persons overheard by Mr. Brown
was Wolfe, and the peculiar tone of oratorical exaggeration,
characteristic of the man, has already informed the reader with which
of the two he is identified.

On the evening after the conversation--the evening fixed for the
desperate design on which he had set the last hazard of his life--the
republican, parting from the companions with whom he had passed the
day, returned home to compose the fever of his excited thoughts, and
have a brief hour of solitary meditation, previous to the committal of
that act which he knew must be his immediate passport to the jail and
the gibbet. On entering his squalid and miserable home, the woman of
the house, a blear-eyed and filthy hag, who was holding to her
withered breast an infant, which, even in sucking the stream that
nourished its tainted existence, betrayed upon its haggard countenance
the polluted nature of the mother's milk, from which it drew at once
the support of life and the seeds of death,--this woman, meeting him
in the narrow passage, arrested his steps to acquaint him that a
gentleman had that day called upon him and left a letter in his room