Page:The Campaner thal, and other writings.djvu/75

 that she intended to give me something from the Souvenir, and when, in its stead, she took the milliped's prison from her pocket, he obligingly said, "If not with my hands yet with my eyes I assisted at the theft, and as accomplice I beg for mercy." The serious apology for this foolishness scarcely suited our earnest tone of mind. I said, "I wished to cause a more useless than pardonable joke, but I—" She did not allow me to conclude, but mildly and unchanged (except by a reproving and a forgiving smile) she showed me in the aromatic book the noble Karlson's requiem on the death of the exalted Gione. I willingly give you the prosaic echo of it, from my prosaic memory.

GRIEF WITHOUT HOPE.

HAT cloud is that, which like the clouds of the tropics, passes from morn to eve, and then sets? It is humanity. Is that the magnet-mountain covered with the nails of wrecked ships? No, it is the great Earth, strewed with the bones of fallen men.

Ah! why did I love? I had not then lost so much!

Nadine, give me thy grief, for it contains hope. Thou standest by thy crushed sister, who dissolves even beneath the winding-sheet, and lookest upwards to the trembling stars, and thinkest: Above, O dearest one, thou dost reside, and on the suns we find again our hearts, and the small tears of life will be over.

But mine remain, and burn in the dim eye. My cypress alley is not open, and discloses no heaven. Human blood paints the fluid figure called man on the monument, as oil on marble forms forests; Death wipes away the man, and leaves the stone. Gione! I would have