Will Jules lose the bloom of his youth? 65

_Schramm._ Nothing worth keeping is ever lost in this
world: look at a blossom--it drops presently, having done
its service and lasted its time; but fruits succeed, and
where would be the blossom's place could it continue?
As well affirm that your eye is no longer in your body, 70
because its earliest favorite, whatever it may have first
loved to look on, is dead and done with--as that any affection
is lost to the soul when its first object, whatever
happened first to satisfy it, is superseded in due course.
Keep but ever looking, whether with the body's eye or the 75
mind's, and you will soon find something to look on! Has
a man done wondering at women?--there follow men,
dead and alive, to wonder at. Has he done wondering at
men?--there's God to wonder at; and the faculty of wonder
may be, at the same time, old and tired enough with 80
respect to its first object, and yet young and fresh sufficiently,
so far as concerns its novel one. Thus--

_1st Student._ Put Schramm's pipe into his mouth again!
There you see! Well, this Jules--a wretched fribble
--oh, I watched his disportings at Possagno, the other 85
day! Canova's gallery--you know: there he marches first
resolvedly past great works by the dozen without vouchsafing
an eye; all at once he stops full at the
_Psiche-fanciulla_--cannot
pass that old acquaintance without a
nod of encouragement--"In your new place, beauty? 90
Then behave yourself as well here as at Munich--I see
you!" Next he posts himself deliberately before the unfinished
_Pieta_ for half an hour without moving, till up he
starts of a sudden, and thrusts his very nose into--I say,
into--the group; by which gesture you are informed that 95
precisely the sole point he had not fully mastered in
Canova's practice was a certain method of using the drill
in the articulation of the knee-joint--and that, likewise,
has he mastered at length! Good-by, therefore, to poor
Canova--whose gallery no longer needs detain his successor 100
Jules, the predestinated novel thinker in marble!

_5th Student._ Tell him about the women; go on to the
women!

_1st Student._ Why, on that matter he could never be
supercilious enough. How should we be other (he sa