Page:The Campaner thal, and other writings.djvu/36

 I will not hide from you that during the coupling, softened by the many beauties of spring, I lost myself in Nadine's equally charming ones, which were an undiscovered Central Africa for me, while I wished she were as warm. After eight or ten dreams, I saw the beautiful couples cross my path. How earnestly glad and serene we all stood under the spring music of flutes and pipes, and harps and warbling, which were living around us, with and without wings. Gione and Karlson concealed an equal emotion, as at an almost equal fate. Wilhelmi, who is, as a comet, sometimes in the burning, sometimes in the freezing point of a sun, requires no joys than those of others to make him happy. But a tear stood in Nadine's bright eye, which could not be smiled or looked away. Her heart seemed to me to resemble the earth, whose exterior is cold, but which carries in its centre a latent heat. And yesterday her whole being seemed so mirthful and so gay!

We never make more erroneous conclusions in our opinions on any subject than on woman's cheerfulness. Oh! how many of these charming beings there are, who decay unvalued, who, while jesting, despair, and while joking, bleed to death; who hide their merry laughing eyes behind a wall, as behind a fan, to give glad vent to their long-restrained tears; who pay for a merry day by a tearful night, just as an unusually clear, transparent, and fogless air betokens rain. Remember the beautiful N. N., and also her youngest sister. In the mean time, the charming, sun-variegated dew-drop under Nadine's eye was balanced by a wart of half the size, the solitaire among her personal charms.

Wilhelmi's lyric and dithyrambic head was filled with projects for pleasure, and with the eagerness of delight,