re-rusticated from Goettingen, there would be
Berlin over again, and dear Rahel Levin and her salon, and the
Tuesdays at Elise von Hohenhausen's (at which I would read my _Lyrical
Intermezzo_), and the mad literary nights with the poets in the
Behrenstrasse. And balls, theatres, operas, masquerades--shall I ever
forget the ball when Sir Walter Scott's son appeared as a Scotch
Highlander, just when all Berlin was mad about the Waverley Novels! I,
too, should read them over again for the first time, those wonderful
romances; yes, and I should write my own early books over again--oh,
the divine joy of early creation!--and I should set out again with
bounding pulses on my _Harzreise_: and the first night of _Freischuetz_
would come once more, and I should be whistling the _Jungfern_ and
sipping punch in the Casino, with Lottchen filling up my glass." His
eyes oozed tears, and suddenly he stretched out his arms and seized
her hand and pressed it frantically, his face and body convulsed, his
paralyzed eyelids dropping. "No, no!" he pleaded, in a hoarse, hollow
voice, as she strove to withdraw it, "I hear the footsteps of death, I
must cling on to life; I must, I must. O the warmth and the scent of
it!"

She shuddered. For an instant he seemed a vampire with shut eyes
sucking at her life-blood to sustain his; and when that horrible
fantasy passed, there remained the overwhelming tragedy of a dead man
lusting for life. Not this the ghost, who, as Berlioz put it, stood at
the window of his grave, regarding and mocking the world in which he
had no further part. But his fury waned, he fell back as in a stupor,
and lay silent, little twitches passing over his sightless face.

She bent over him, terribly distressed. Should she go? Should she ring
again? Presently words came from his lips at intervals, abrupt,
disconnected, and now a ribald laugh, and now a tearful sigh. And then
he was a student humming:

"Gaudeamus igitur, juvenes dum sumus,"

and his death-mask lit up with the wild joys of living. And then
earlier memories still--of his childhood in Duesseldorf--seemed to flow
through his comatose brain; his mother and brothers and sisters; the
dancing-master he threw out of the window; the emancipation of the
Jewry by the French conquerors; the joyous drummer who taught him
French; the passing of Napoleon on his white horse; the atheist
school-boy friend with whom he studied Spinoza on the sly, and the
country louts from