, 'compared to Marzell's
long tale, with all its psychological remarks and illustrations. Mine
is a very commonplace piece of fun. You know that, about this time two
years ago, I was in a very strange condition altogether. Probably it
was the state of my health, which was very queer at that time, which
had converted me into a terribly sensitive, overstrung, fanciful
spirit-seer. I was always floating on a boundless ocean of dreams and
presentiments. I thought I understood the language of birds, like a
Persian Mage. I heard voices in the rustling of the trees, sometimes of
warning, sometimes of consolation. I saw my own image wandering in the
clouds of the sky. Very well! It happened one day, when I was sitting
in a lonely part of the Thiergarten on a bank of grass, that I got into
a condition which I can only compare to that species of delirium which
one often feels just when one is falling asleep. I seemed to be
suddenly surrounded with the scent of a most delicious rose, but at the
same time I became aware that this rose odour really was a beautiful
being, whom I had long, though unconsciously, loved with the deepest
and most passionate devotion. I strove to see her with my corporeal
eyes; but it seemed to me that a great, dark-red carnation was laid on
my brow, and the scent of this carnation burned away the rose perfume,
as with a scorching ray, benumbing my senses so that a bitter sense of
pain took possession of me, which strove to find expression in accents
of wild anguish. Through the trees came sighing a sound like that when
the evening wind touches the AEolian Harp with a gentle waft of its
pinions, and breaks the spell which holds the music prisoned and
sleeping within the strings. But this was not _my_ sound. It was that
of the beautiful being who was stricken to death (as I was also) by the
hostile contact of the carnation. If I may put this vision of mine into
the form of an Indian myth, I might say that the rose and the carnation
represented, for me, life and death; and all the absurdities which I
said and perpetrated this day two years ago were chiefly due to the
circumstance that in that beautiful creature, who was sitting in that
chair there, and who has since assumed the corporeal form of Pauline
Asling, I fancied I recognized her whose love had disclosed itself to
me in the form of the rose perfume. You remember that I got away from
you as soon as I could, leaving you in the Thiergarten. A sure
presen