Otti. Sebald? Seb. Wipe off that paint! I hate you. Otti. Miserable! Seb. My God, and she is emptied of it now! Outright now!--how miraculously gone All of the grace--had she not strange grace once? Why, the blank cheek hangs listless as it likes, No purpose holds the features up to gether. Only the cloven brow and puckered chin Otti. Broke the delicious broken! indolence-all She would succeed in her absurd attempt, And fascinate by sinning, show herself Superior-guilt from its excess superior To innocence! That little peasant's voice Has righted all again. Though I be lost, Iknow which is the better, never fear, Of vice or virtue, purity or lust, Nature or trick! Isee what I have done, Entirely now! Oh I am proud to feel 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! Own Heart's Sebald! There, there, both deaths presently! Seb. My brain is drowned now-quite drowned: all I feel s... is, at swift-recurring intervals, A hurry-down within me, as of waters oosened to smother up some ghastly pit: There they go-whirls from a black fiery sea! Otti. Not me to him, O God, be merciful! alk by the way, while PIPPA is passing from the hillside to Orcana. Foreign Students of painting and sculpture, from Venice, assembled opposite the house of JYLES, a young French statuary, at Passagno. 1st Student. Attention! My own post is eneath this window, but the pomegranate lump yonder will hide three or four of you with a little squeezing, and Schramm and is pipe must lie flat in the balcony. Four, five- who's a defaulter? We want everybody, for Jules must not be suffered to hurt his bride when the jest's found out. 2d Stud. 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 lics, 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. Phobus' emulsion-One bottle Clears your throttle. Mercury's bolusOne box Cures. 3d Stud. Subside, my fine fellow! If the marriage was over by ten o'clock, Jules will certainly be here in a minute with his bride. 2d Stud. 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! 1st Stud. 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 stonesquarer, who came along 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. It is too late to alter? These love-letters, now, you call his-I can't laugh at them. 4th Stud. Because you never read the sham letters of our inditing which drew forth these. Gott. His discovery of the truth will be frightful. 4th Stud. 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! Gott. 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 aspiration: but now he is to have the reality." There you laugh again! I say, you wipe off the very dew of his youth. 1st Stud. 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 blossomit 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 favorite, 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 object, and yet young and fresh sufficiently, so far as concerns its novel one. Thus . 1st Stud. Put Schramm's pipe into his mouth again! There, you see! Well, this Jules a wretched fribble-oh, I watched his disportings at Possagno, the other day! Canova's gallery-you know; There he marches first resolvedly past great works by the dozen without vouchsafing an eye: all at once he stops full at the Psiche-fanciulla-cannot pass that old acquaintance without a nod of encouragement-"In your new place, beauty? Then behave yourself as well here as at Munich -I see you!" Next he posts himself deliberately before the unfinished Pietà for half an hour without moving, till up he starts of a sudden, and thrusts his very nose into -I say, into-the group; by which gesture you are informed that precisely the sole point he had not fully mastered in Canova's practice was a certain method of using the drill in the articulation of the knee-jointand that, likewise, has he mastered at length! Good-by, therefore, to poor Canova -whose gallery no longer needs detain his successor Jules, the predestinated novel thinker in marble! 5th Stud. Tell him about the women: go on to the women! 1st Stud. Why, on that matter he could never be supercilious enough. How should we be other (he said) than the poor devils, you see, with those debasing habits we cherish! He was not to wallow in that mire, at least; he would wait, and love only at the proper time, and meanwhile put up with the Psiche-fanciulla. Now, I hap pened to hear of a young Greek-real Greek girl at Malamocco: a true Islander, do you see, with Alciphron's "hair like seamoss Schramm knows! - white and quiet as an apparition, and fourteen years old at farthest,-a daughter of Natalia, so she swears-that hag Natalia, who helps us to models at three lire an hour. We selected this girl for the heroine of our jest. So, first, Jules received a scented lettersomebody had seen his Tydeus at the Academy, and my picture was nothing to it: a profound admirer bade him perseverewould make herself known to him ere long. (Paolina, my little friend of the Fenice, transcribes divinely.) And in due time, the mysterious correspondent gave certain hints of her peculiar charins--the pale cheeks, the black hair-whatever, in short, had struck us in our Malamocco model; we retained her name, too-Phene, which is by interpretation, sea-eagle. Now, think of Jules finding himself distinguished from the herd of us by such a creature! In his very first answer he proposed marrying his monitress: and fancy us over these letters, two, three times a day, to receive and dispatch! I concocted the main of it: relations were in the way-secrecy must be observed in fine, would he wed her on trust, and only speak to her when they were indissolubly united? St-st-Here they come ! 6th Stud. Both of them! Heaven's love, speak softly, speak within yourselves! 5th Stud. Look at the bridgroom! Half his hair in storm and half in calm,-patted down over the left temple,-like a frothy cup one blows on to cool it and the same old blouse that he murders the marble in. 2d Stud. Not a rich vest like yours, Hannibal Scratchy !-rich, that your face may the better set it off. 6th Stud. And the bride! Yes, sure enough, our Phene! Should you have known her in her clothes? How magnificently pale. Gott. She does not also take it for earnest, I hope? 1st Stud. Oh, Natalia's concern, that is. We settle with Natalia. 6th Stud. She does not speak-has evidently let out no word. The only thing is, will she equally remember the rest of her lesson, and repeat correctly all those verses which are to break the secret to Jules ? Gott. How he gazes on her! Pity-pity 1st Stud. They go in; now, silence! You three,-not nearer the window, mind, look ever This one way till I change, grow you— I could Change into you, beloved! You by me, And I by you; this is your hand in mine, And side by side we sit: all 's true. Thank God! I have spoken: speak you! O my life to come! My Tydeus must be carved that's there in clay; Yet how be carved, with you about the room? Where must I place you? When I think that once This room-full of rough block-work seemed my heaven Without you! Shall I ever work again, My hand transfers its lineaments to stone? Will my mere fancies live near you, their truth The live truth, passing and repassing Again upon your search? My statues. then! -Ah, do not mind that-better that will look When cast in bronze-an Almaign Kaiser, that, Swart-green and gold, with truncheon based on hip. This, rather, turn to! What, unrecognized? I thought you would have seen that here you sit As I imagined you,-Hippolyta, So you commanded-" carve, against I come, A Greek, in Athens, as our fashion was, Feasting, bay-filleted and thunder-free, Who rises 'neath the lifted myrtlebranch. Praise those who slew Hipparchus !' cry the guests, |