nbroken, and a broken heart.'" His head fell back in ineffable
hopelessness. "Ah," he murmured, "it was ever my prayer, 'Lord, let me
grow old in body, but let my soul stay young; let my voice quaver and
falter, but never my hope.' And this is how I end."

"But your work does not end. Your fight was not vain. You are the
inspirer of young Germany. And you are praised and worshipped by all
the world. Is that no pleasure?"

"No, I am not _le bon Dieu_!" He chuckled, his spirits revived by the
blasphemous _mot_." Ah, what a fate! To have the homage only of the
fools, a sort of celestial Victor Cousin. One compliment from Hegel
now must be sweeter than a churchful of psalms." A fearful fit of
coughing interrupted further elaboration of the blasphemous fantasia.
For five minutes it rent and shook him, the nurse bending fruitlessly
over him; but at its wildest he signed to his visitor not to go, and
when at last it lulled he went on calmly: "Donizetti ended mad in a
gala dress, but I end at least sane enough to appreciate the joke--a
little long-drawn out, and not entirely original, yet replete with
ingenious irony. Little Lucy looks shocked, but I sometimes think,
little Lucy, the disrespect is with the goody-goody folks, who, while
lauding their Deity's strength and hymning His goodness, show no
recognition at all of His humor. Yet I am praised as a wit as well as
a poet. If I could take up my bed and walk, I would preach a new
worship--the worship of the Arch-Humorist. I should draw up the Ritual
of the Ridiculous. Three times a day, when the _muezzin_ called from
the Bourse-top, all the faithful would laugh devoutly at the gigantic
joke of the cosmos. How sublime, the universal laugh! at sunrise,
noon, and sunset; those who did not laugh would be persecuted; they
would laugh, if only on the wrong side of the mouth. Delightful! As
most people have no sense of humor, they will swallow the school
catechism of the comic as stolidly as they now swallow the spiritual.
Yes, I see you will _not_ laugh. But why may I not endow my Deity--as
everybody else does--with the quality which I possess or admire most?"

She felt some truth in his apology. He was mocking, not God, but the
magnified man of the popular creeds; to him it was a mere intellectual
counter with which his wit played, oblivious of the sacred _aura_ that
clung round the concept for the bulk of the world. Even his famous
picture of Jehovah dying, or his suggestion th