293
AUTOMATONS 352
THE DOGE AND THE DOGARESSA 382

SECTION IV.

MASTER MARTIN, THE COOPER, AND HIS MEN 447
THE STRANGER CHILD 509

THE SERAPION BRETHREN.

SECTION I.

"Look at the question how one will, the bitter conviction is not to be
got rid of by persuasion, or by force, that what has been never, never
can be again. It is useless to contend with the irresistible power of
Time, which goes on continually creating by a process of constant
destruction. Nothing survives save the shadowy reflected images left by
that part of our lives which has set, and gone far below our horizon;
and they often haunt and mock us like evil, ghostly dreams. But _we_
are fools, and expect that matters which, in reality, were nothing but
our _ideas_, parts and portions of our own individualities, are to be
found actually existent in the world outside us, and blooming in
perpetual youth! The woman we have loved and parted from, the friend to
whom we have said good-bye, are both lost to us for ever. The people
whom, perhaps years afterwards, we meet as _being_ them, are not the
same whom we left, neither are we ever the same to them."

So saying, Lothair got up from his seat, and folding his arms on the
mantel-piece, gazed, with gloomy sadness, into the fire which was
blazing and crackling merrily.

"One thing is certain enough," said Theodore, "that, at all events,
you, dear Lothair, are so far actually the same Lothair whom I bade
good-bye to twelve years ago, that whenever any little thing vexes or
disappoints you at all, you immediately sink down to the lowest depths
of gloom and despair. It is quite true--and Cyprian, Ottmar and I feel
it as much as you that this first meeting of ours after our twelve
years' separation comes short of being quite all that we had pictured
it to be. Put the blame on me, who raced through one of those endless
streets of ours after another, leaving no stone unturned to get you all
assembled here to-night by my fireside. Perhaps I had better have left
it to chance. But I could not bear the idea that we--who had spent so
many years together in such close friendship, joined by the bonds of
our common pursuits in art and kn