om the crimson blossoms of the crete-de-coq, whose radicles
sought sustenance, perhaps from human dust, in the decay of
generations:--all that rich life of graves summoned up fancies of
Resurrection, Nature's resurrection-work--wondrous transformations of
flesh, marvellous bans migration of souls! ... From some forgotten
crevice of that tomb roof, which alone intervened between her and the
vast light, a sturdy weed was growing. He knew that plant, as it
quivered against the blue,--the chou-gras, as Creole children call it:
its dark berries form the mockingbird's favorite food ... Might not its
roots, exploring darkness, have found some unfamiliar nutriment
within?--might it not be that something of the dead heart had risen to
purple and emerald life--in the sap of translucent leaves, in the wine
of the savage berries,--to blend with the blood of the Wizard
Singer,--to lend a strange sweetness to the melody of his wooing? ...

... Seldom, indeed, does it happen that a man in the prime of youth, in
the possession of wealth, habituated to comforts and the elegances of
life, discovers in one brief week how minute his true relation to the
human aggregate,--how insignificant his part as one living atom of the
social organism. Seldom, at the age of twenty-eight, has one been made
able to comprehend, through experience alone, that in the vast and
complex Stream of Being he counts for less than a drop; and that, even
as the blood loses and replaces its corpuscles, without a variance in
the volume and vigor of its current, so are individual existences
eliminated and replaced in the pulsing of a people's life, with never a
pause in its mighty murmur. But all this, and much more, Julien had
learned in seven merciless days--seven successive and terrible shocks
of experience. The enormous world had not missed him; and his place
therein was not void--society had simply forgotten him. So long as he
had moved among them, all he knew for friends had performed their petty
altruistic roles,--had discharged their small human obligations,--had
kept turned toward him the least selfish side of their natures,--had
made with him a tolerably equitable exchange of ideas and of favors;
and after his disappearance from their midst, they had duly mourned for
his loss--to themselves! They had played out the final act in the
unimportant drama of his life: it was really asking too much to demand
a repetition ... Impossible to deceive himself as t