ge their complexion; and without enlarging or minimizing, they
will alternate their effect on us immensely through the colour presenting
them now sombre, now hopeful: doing its work of extravagance upon
perceptibly plain matter. The fitful colour is the fever. He must win
her, for he never yet had failed--he had lost her by his folly! She was
his--she was torn from him! She would come at his bidding--she would
cower to her tyrants! The thought of her was life and death in his frame,
bright heaven and the abyss. At one beat of the heart she swam to his
arms, at another he was straining over darkness. And whose the fault?

He rose out of his amazement crying it with a roar, and foreignly
beholding himself. He pelted himself with epithets; his worst enemies
could not have been handier in using them. From Alvan to Alvan, they
signified such an earthquake in a land of splendid structures as shatters
to dust the pride of the works of men. He was down among them, lower than
the herd, rolling in vulgar epithets that, attached to one like him,
became of monstrous distortion. O fool! dolt! blind ass! tottering idiot!
drunken masquerader! miserable Jack Knave, performing suicide with that
blessed coxcomb air of curling a lock!--Clotilde! Clotilde! Where has one
read the story of a man who had the jewel of jewels in his hand, and
flung in into the deeps, thinking that he flung a pebble? Fish, fool,
fish! and fish till Doomsday! There's nothing but your fool's face in the
water to be got to bite at the bait you throw, fool! Fish for the
flung-away beauty, and hook your shadow of a Bottom's head! What impious
villain was it refused the gift of the gods, that he might have it
bestowed on him according to his own prescription of the ceremonies! They
laugh! By Orcus! how they laugh! The laughter of the gods is the
lightning of death's irony over mortals. Can they have a finer subject
than a giant gone fool?

Tears burst from him: tears of rage, regret, selflashing. O for
yesterday! He called aloud for the recovery of yesterday, bellowed,
groaned. A giant at war with pigmies, having nought but their weapons,
having to fight them on his knees, to fight them with the right hand
while smiting himself with the left, has too much upon him to keep his
private dignity in order. He was the same in his letters--a Cyclops
hurling rocks and raising the seas to shipwreck. Dignity was cast off; he
came out naked. Letters to Clotilde, and to the baron