Page:A Picture-book without Pictures and Other Stories (1848).djvu/85



I know a theatrical Clown,—said the Moon,—the public applauds when it sees him; every one of his movements is comic, and throws the house into convulsions of laughter, and yet he is not moved thereby: that is his peculiarity. When he was yet a child, and played with other boys, he was already a punchinello. Nature had made him one; had given him one lump upon his back, and another upon his breast. The inner man, however—the spiritual—that was really well-formed. No human being had deeper feeling, or greater elasticity of mind than he. The theatre was his ideal-world. Had he been slender and well proportioned, then he might have become a first-rate tragic