"During the long journey from Rome his mind had abandoned itself to vagueness; he was unable to question the future. He made this journey with blind eyes and gained little pleasure in the countries he passed through, though adorned with the richest freshness of spring, his thoughts followed their course through other strange-looking, dimly lighted countries, pathless lands, in which there was no change of seasons, but only as it was. He had much to think about; but it was neither reflection nor conscious purpose that filled his mind, and sudden dull flashes of memory, of expectation and went according to the their will, but he saw them only in discontinuous images, which rose and fell according to a logic all their own." (606) Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an original essay This passage, from the final chapters of The Portrait of a Lady, strikes me as one of the most brutally sad moments in the entire novel. Here Isabel, who has defied Osmond's wishes to submit to the sanctity of their marriage, with a solemn and ghostly nod to the freedom and independence that characterized her throughout, has come to be beside her cousin Ralph as he dies. What makes the passage so effectively tragic is that in tone, language, and imagery it picks up on notes that have been played over and over again since the novel began; at the same time, however, we cannot help but register the differences in the workings of our heroine's mind as she tries to make sense of what has happened to her. Much of the poignancy of the above lines comes from the way they contrast with James' earlier descriptions of Isabel's mindset. It is surely part of his suitability as a protagonist that from the beginning of the novel his mind is constantly and brilliantly alive: "His imagination was by habit ridiculously active..." (86). The most fertile ground for his imagination is his own life: "He was always planning his development, desiring his perfection, observing his progress." (It is interesting to note, here and elsewhere in the novel, the way in which James often causes Isabel to consider herself in her own mind as an external, abstract, almost objectified subject: James might well have written down her own development or perfection, but chose not to, leaving us with the subtle impression that in her mind she is somehow disconnected from herself.) Given these early descriptions of Isabel, it is difficult not to register the simple force of the statement that "she was unable to question the future" she, and by natural extension the reader, has been stripped of one of her most vibrant faculties, and James has ensured that we feel the immensity of this momentary loss. Another thing to note in this passage is James' metaphorical use of landscape. In the novel's opening chapters, we are told of Isabel: "Her nature had, in its conceit, a certain garden-like quality, a hint of perfume and whispering branches, of shady bowers and elongated vistas, which made her to feel that introspection was after all an open-air exercise, and that a visit to the recesses of the spirit was harmless when one returned with a lap of roses."(107) Now that his tale is not more an abstract matter before her, her thoughts move through "other strange-looking, dimly lighted, pathless countries, in which there was no changing of the seasons, but only, as it seemed, a perpetual gloom of winter . "(606) Compared to the seemingly infinite openness of the initial descriptions, this new.