Ottima. To me-not of me! Ungrateful, perju cheat! A coward too but ingrate 's worse than all. Sebald. My God! Those morbid olive faultless shoulder-blades I should have known there was no blood beneath! She would succeed in her absurd attempt, Nature or trick! I see what I have done, Entirely now! Oh I am proud to feel To th Such torments-let the world take credit thence I, having done my deed, pay too its price! I hate, hate-curse you! God 's in his heaven! - Me! Me! no, no, Sebald, not yourself-kill me! Yourself-then-presently-first hear me speak! Lean on my breast-not as a breast; don't love me Heart's Sebald! There, there, both deaths presently! Sebald. My brain is drowned now-quite drowned: all I feel Is . . . is, at swift-recurring intervals, A hurry-down within me, as of waters Loosened to smother up some ghastly pit: There they go-whirls from a black fiery sea! Talk by the way, while PIPPA is passing from the hill-side to Orcana. Foreign Students of painting and sculpture, from Venice, assembled opposite the house of JULES, a young French statuary, at Possagno. 1st Student. Attention! My own post is beneath this window, but the pomegranate clump yonder will hide three or four of you with a little squeezing, and Schramm and his pipe must lie flat in the balcony. Four, fivewho's a defaulter? We want everybody, for Jules must not be suffered to hurt his bride when the jest 's found out. 2nd Student. All here! Only our poet's away-never having much meant to be present, moonstrike him! The airs of that fellow, that Giovacchino! He was in violent love with himself, and had a fair prospect of thriving in his suit, so unmolested was it,-when suddenly a woman falls in love with him, too; and out of pure jealousy he takes himself off to Trieste, immortal poem and all whereto is this prophetical epitaph appended already, as Bluphocks assures me,-" Here a mammoth-poem lies, Fouled to death by butterflies." His own fault, the simpleton ! Instead of cramp couplets, each like a knife in your entrails, he should write, says Bluphocks, both classically and intelligibly. -Esculapius, an Epic. Catalogue of the drugs: Hebe's plaister-One strip Cools your lip. Phœbus' emulsionOne bottle Clears your throttle. Mercury's bolus-One 3rd Student. Subside, my fine fellow! If the marriage was over by ten o'clock, Jules will certainly be here in a minute with his bride. 2nd Student. Good!—only, so should the poet's muse have been universally acceptable, says Bluphocks, et canibus nostris . . . and Delia not better known to our literary dogs than the boy Giovacchino ! Ist Student. To the point, now. Where's Gottlieb, the new-comer? Oh,-listen, Gottlieb, to what has called down this piece of friendly vengeance on Jules, of which we now assemble to witness the winding-up. We are all agreed, all in a tale, observe, when Jules shall burst out on us in a fury by and by: I am spokesman-the verses that are to undeceive Jules bear my name of Lutwyche --but each professes himself alike insulted by this strutting stone-squarer, who came alone from Paris to Munich, and thence with a crowd of us to Venice and Possagno here, but proceeds in a day or two alone again—oh, alone indubitably!-to Rome and Florence. He, forsooth, take up his portion with these dissolute, brutalized, heartless bunglers !--so he was heard to call us all: now, is Schramm brutalized, I should like to know? Am I heartless? Gottlieb. Why, somewhat heartless; for, suppose Jules a coxcomb as much as you choose, still, for this mere coxcombry, you will have brushed off-what do folks style it? the bloom of his life. Is it too late to alter? These love-letters now, you call his-I can't laugh at them.. 4th Student. Because you never read the sham letters of our inditing which drew forth these. Gottlieb. His discovery of the truth will be frightful. 4th Student. That's the joke. But you should have joined us at the beginning: there's no doubt he loves the girl-loves a model he might hire by the hour! Gottlieb. See here! "He has been accustomed," he writes, "to have Canova's women about him, in stone, "and the world's women beside him, in flesh; these "being as much below, as those above, his soul's aspi"ration but now he is to have the reality." There you laugh again! I say, you wipe off the very dew of his youth. Ist Student. Schramm! (Take the pipe out of his mouth, somebody!) Will Jules lose the bloom of his youth? Schramm. Nothing worth keeping is ever lost in this world look at a blossom-it drops presently, having done its service and lasted its time; but fruits succeed, and where would be the blossom's place could it continue? As well affirm that your eye is no longer in your body, because its earliest favourite, whatever it may have first loved to look on, is dead and done with— as that any affection is lost to the soul when its first object, whatever happened first to satisfy it, is superseded in due course. Keep but ever looking, whether with the body's eye or the mind's, and you will soon find something to look on! Has a man done wondering at women? —there follow men, dead and alive, to wonder at. Has he done wondering at men ?—there's God to wonder at: and the faculty of wonder may be, at the same time, old and tired enough with respect to its first |