priest. I could no longer distinguish dreams from real life; I did not know where reality began and illusion ended. The dissolute, supercilious young lord jeered at the priest, and the priest abhorred the dissipations of the young lord.” But were he humble priest, or were he profligate patrician, one emotion remained eternally the same, his love for Clarimonde. At length the Abbé Serapion dissolves the glamour. Sternly he bids young Romuald accompany him to the deserted cemetery where Clarimonde lies buried; he exhumes the body, and as he sprinkles it with holy water it crumbles into dust. Then also has the lord Romuald gone for ever. There only remains the poor priest of God broken and alone, who grows old in an obscure parish in the depths of a wood, and who well-nigh half a century after scarcely dares to stir the ashes of that memory.
There are in English not a few stories which deal with the vampire tradition, and many of these are well imagined and cleverly contrived; the morbid horror of the thing has often been conveyed with considerable power, but yet it will, I think, be universally allowed that no author has written pages comparable to this story of Gautier. It is hardly to be disputed that the best of the English vampire stories is Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla, which the authorities upon the bibliography of this author[64] have not traced further back than its appearance in the collection entitled In A Glass Darkly, 1872,[65] Carmilla which is a story of some length, containing sixteen chapters, is exceedingly well told and it certainly exhibits that note of haunting dread which is peculiar to Le Fanu’s work. The castle in Styria and the family who inhabit it are excellently done, nor will the arrival of Carmilla and the mysterious coach wherein sat “a hideous black woman, with a sort of coloured turban on her head, who was gazing all the time from the carriage window, nodding and grinning derisively towards the ladies, with gleaming eyes and large white eyeballs, and her teeth set as if in fury,” easily be forgotten.
It must suffice to mention very briefly but a few short stories in English where the vampire element is present. E. F. Benson has evoked real horror in his The Room in the Tower and the horrible creature tangled in her rotting shroud all foul with mould and damp who returns from her accursed grave is loathly to the last degree.
