hind my gay, richly decorated dust, onion and relic box is only another incentive, not only to drug, but also to absolve myself, for when older we are less missed. And oven you, who so seldom hang us, or drive us all to the Devil, I mean, how seldom soever the tempest of anger sours the beer-barrel of your breast! Even you have no more efficacious morsel of white chalk, no better oleum tartari per deliquium,[1] with which you can sweeten your internal fluids, than the thought how we shall all turn pale round your death-bed, and be dumb at your grave-mound, and how none will forget you! I cannot possibly believe that there exists one being who, when death draws him into the diving-bell of the grave, will not leave one weeping eye, one bending head behind, and therefore each one can love the soul which will some time weep for him.
When I think now of the convalescent Gione, with her wounded heart, which had received a new sensitiveness in the hot electric atmosphere of the sinking thunderbolt of Death, I need not measure her emotion at Karlson's poem, by the dew and hygrometer, nor with the loadstone of her love. But not Willielmi's brilliant riches, nor his still more brilliant conduct, her first choice, her first promise, forbade her even to touch the diamond scales.
When Karlson told me all this, he turned Gione's ring-portrait upwards on his finger, and pressed the hard edge of the ring-finger with his tearful eyes, till the adorned hand was unconsciously touched by the lip's kiss. The bashfulness of his grief moved me so much, that I offered to take another route into the Vale, under the pretence that the dreams of it had lessened the desire for the reality, and that we should disturb the newly-affianced
- ↑ Ten drops of this instantly sweeten half a pound of sour beer.
