when it was over. He always left his chair for this performance, walking slowly to and fro while he chanted the rhythmical, sonorous sentences:
"O just, subtle and mighty opium! that, to the hearts of rich and poor alike, for the wounds that will never heal, and for the pangs of grief that tempt the spirit to rebel, bringest an assuaging balm;--eloquent opium! that with thy potent rhetoric stealest away the purposes of wrath.... Thou buildest upon the bosom of darkness, out of the fantastic imagery of the brain, cities and temples, beyond the art of Phidias and Praxiteles, beyond the splendours of Babylon and Hekatompylos; ... and hast the keys of Paradise, O just, subtle and mighty opium...!"
"Ach! wie prachtvoll!" he would cry a moment later, "wie wunderschoen!" and then would recite a translation he had made into his own tongue, and a very fine one too. Quite delighted, he would repeat the passage over and over again, pausing to compare the two versions, fixing me with his big eyes in order to increase his own pleasure in the music by witnessing the evidence of my own.
Truly he was a Jekyll and Hyde.
It was only during the Jekyll mood this kind of scene took place; in the Jekyll happy humour, too, that I had told him about my strange up-bringing. "Now I understand better," he said, "why you are still so young and know so little of life, and why you are so foolishly good to Boyde"--which annoyed me, because I considered myself now quite old and a thorough man of the world as well.
It was in this mood, too, that we discussed my own theories and beliefs ... a life in the woods as well. Kay, himself and his family, Boyde and I were to settle in the backwoods ... perhaps I was as eloquent as I was earnest; he listened attentively; sometimes he seemed almost ready to consent; he understood, at any rate, the deep spell that Nature had for me. But he only smiled when I said I was a failure and an outcast. My
life had hardly begun yet! No man was a failure who
