et the world take credit thence--
I, having done my deed, pay too its price! 260
I hate, hate--curse you! God's in his heaven!

_Ottima._ --Me!
Me! no, no, Sebald, not yourself--kill me!
Mine is the whole crime. Do but kill me--then
Yourself--then--presently--first hear me speak
I always meant to kill myself--wait, you! 265
Lean on my breast--not as a breast; don't love me
The more because you lean on me, my own
Heart's Sebald! There, there, both deaths presently!

_Sebald._ My brain is drowned now--quite drowned: all I feel
Is ... is, at swift-recurring intervals, 270
A hurry-down within me, as of waters
Loosened to smother up some ghastly pit:
There they go--whirls from a black, fiery sea!

_Ottima._ Not me--to him, O God, be merciful!

_Talk by the way, while_ PIPPA _is passing from the hillside to Orcana.
Foreign Students of painting and sculpture, from Venice, assembled
opposite the house of_ JULES, _a young French statuary, at Possagno_.

_1st Student._ Attention! My own post is beneath this
window, but the pomegranate clump yonder will hide three
or four of you with a little squeezing, and Schramm and
his pipe must lie flat in the balcony. Four, five--who's a
defaulter? We want everybody, for Jules must not be 5
suffered to hurt his bride when the jest's found out.

_2nd Student._ All here! Only our poet's away--never
having much meant to be present, moonstrike him! The
airs of that fellow, that Giovacchino! He was in violent
love with himself, and had a fair prospect of thriving in 10
his suit, so unmolested was it--when suddenly a woman
falls in love with him, too; and out of pure jealousy he
takes himself off to Trieste, immortal poem and all--whereto
is this prophetical epitaph appended already, as
Bluphocks assures me--"_Here a mammoth-poem lies, 15
Fouled to death by butterflies._" His own fault, the
simpleton! Instead of cramp couplets, each like a knife
in your entrails, he should write, says Bluphocks, both
classically and intelligibly.--_AEsculapius, an Epic. Catalogue
of the drugs: Hebe's plaister--One strip Cools_ 20
_your lip. Phoebus's emulsion--One bottle Clears your
throttle. Mercury's bolus--One box Cures--_