Page:Hyperion, a romance.djvu/48

44 down the dusty page, like the galley-slaves that sweep the streets of Rome, where you may chance to see the nobleman and the peasant manacled together.”

Flemming smiled at the German’s warmth, to which the presence of the lady and the Laubenheimer wine seemed each to have contributed something, and then said:—

“Better an outlaw than not free!—These are his own words. And thus he changes at his will. Like the God Thor, of the old Northern mythology, he now holds forth the seven stars in the bright heaven above us, and now hides himself in clouds, and pounds away with his great hammer.”

“And yet this is not affectation in him,” rejoined the German. “It is his nature,—it is Jean Paul. And the figures and ornaments of his style, wild, fantastic, and ofttimes startling, like those in Gothic cathedrals, are not merely what they seem, but massive coignes and buttresses, which support the fabric. Remove them, and the roof and walls fall in. And through these gargoyles, these wild faces, these images of beasts and men carved upon spouts and gutters, flow out, like gathered rain, the bright, abundant thoughts