e well-spring of that love which covers everything else with
oblivion, overcomes the difference of race, and washes clean out the
black color of the skin.

"When Othello kissed her for the first time, she closed her eyes, and
he kissed her on the eyes; and her eyes are closed not for one instant
merely, but for a long period. But an unparallelled horror, a wild
insanity, would be the result of this shutting of the eyes when
Desdemona should hold in her arms a child, who should appear, in its
whole exterior, strange, abhorrent to her, like some creature that did
not belong to the human race. Out from her heart, crushed and trampled
under foot, there must have come a shriek of agony. A child upon her
breast, a creature so unlike herself! That look, which Hegel describes
as the highest of all that the eye can express, the first look of the
mother upon the child, that first mother's look must have killed
Desdemona, or made her raving mad."

Sonnenkamp, who had all the time been rapidly shifting the whittlings
about with his fingers, now threw them all upon the floor in a heap,
and went up to Eric, holding both hands stretched out at length. His
huge frame trembled with emotion, as he cried out:--

"You are a free man, a freethinker; you are not to be humbugged. You
are the first one that ever gave me a reasonable explanation of this
antipathy. Yes, it's so. The instinct of the poet is wonderfully
prophetic. 'Against all rules of nature!' This is the expression of
Desdemona's father, and this is the whole solution of the problem. On
this expression the whole turns, and every part is in harmony with it.
The result must be, as it is, a product of nature. It's against
nature!"

The men who were present had never before heard Sonnenkamp speak in
this way, and Roland, who had been staring fixedly before him, looked
up as if he must convince himself that it was really his father who was
speaking. In an exultant tone, for he observed the effect produced upon
them all, he continued:--

"Marriage--marriage! The Romans understood what was meant by that.
Where marriage is in violation of nature's laws, there can be no talk
of rights of humanity, equality of rights. Apes, with all their boasted
reason, nothing but apes, are these silly preachers of humanity, who
build up their theories and universal crotchets, without looking at the
facts, and know really nothing of these brutes endowed with speech, who
are not human beings, but e