All, in short, were there; the dead of other generations,
whose moss-grown names could scarce be read upon their tombstones, and
their successors, whose graves were not yet green; all whom black
funerals had followed slowly thither now reappeared where the mourners
left them. Yet none but souls accursed were there, and fiends
counterfeiting the likeness of departed saints.
The countenances of those venerable men, whose very features had been
hallowed by lives of piety, were contorted now by intolerable pain or
hellish passion, and now by an unearthly and derisive merriment. Had the
pastors prayed, all saintlike as they seemed, it had been blasphemy. The
chaste matrons, too, and the maidens with untasted lips, who had slept in
their virgin graves apart from all other dust, now wore a look from which
the two trembling mortals shrank, as if the unimaginable sin of twenty
worlds were collected there. The faces of fond lovers, even of such as
had pined into the tomb, because there their treasure was, were bent on
one another with glances of hatred and smiles of bitter scorn, passions
that are to devils what love is to the blest. At times, the features of
those who had passed from a holy life to heaven would vary to and fro,
between their assumed aspect and the fiendish lineaments whence they had
been transformed.
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