Page:The Campaner thal, and other writings.djvu/57

 and cascades: "Our conversation would better suit a total eclipse of the sun. I would that I could see one, when the moon hangs beauteously before the midday sun, when the noisy day is suddenly hushed, when the nightingales sing, the flowers fade, and when nightly mists and shuddering cold and dew fall." Phylax had now let slip his sofa-cushion into a murmuring spring; Nadine saw it, and, not to confuse him in the act of drawing it out, she, with charming zeal, drove us back to our conversation. Her intercourse with the world had given her a playful, light, ever-joyous exterior. But Gione's style, like the highest Grecian, is, artistically speaking, somewhat meagre and spare,—and the ball-rooms had made her, as mahogany presses make dresses, more agreeable. But her exterior charms did not contradict or injure her interior beauty.

I said to Karlson, "Pray, prove to us the spiritual mortality, this soul's death." "M. Karlson needs not do that," answered the stupid Phylax, vexed at the wet cushion, "only the assertor must prove."

"Very well," I said, "I call proofs objections, but I shall certainly give you only two;—firstly, the proof or objection: the simultaneous decay and destruction of the body and of the soul; secondly, the absolute impossibility of ascertaining the mode of life of a future existence, or as the Chaplain would say, to see into the spiritual world from the sensuous one. Now, M. Karlson, throw your two bombs into the greatest possible angles, which, according to Hennert, is 40 degrees, but according to Bezout, 43 degrees."

He aimed well. He showed how the spiritual Dryad flowered, burst and dispersed with the corporeal bark, how the noblest impulses are chained to the lead—earth, revolving wheel of the body; how memory, imagination,