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a class of men which surpasses all others in a barefaced, blind, self-conceit, just like an unceasing wind blowing from all the points of the compass at once (for a pedant even makes an ostentatious display of his own personal idiosyncrasies). Stiefel, like a careful and conscientious player, felt it a duty to thoroughly throw himself into the part he was representing, and carry it out in all its details, and say "Either" "Or": "Mr. Siebenkæs, either the mourning gown comes, or I go, aut-aut. My visits cannot be of much consequence, it's true, still they have, I consider, a certain value, if it were but on Mrs. Siebenkæs' account." Firmian, doubly irritated, firstly at the imperious rudeness and conceit of an alternative of the sort, and secondly at the lowness of the market price for which the Rath abandoned their society, could but say, "Nobody can influence your decision on that point now but yourself. I most certainly cannot. It will be an easy matter for you, Herr Schulrath, to give up our acquaintance — though there is no real reason why you should-but it will not be easy for me to give up yours, although I shall have no choice." Stiefel, from whose brow the sprouting laurels were thus so unexpectedly shorn—and that, too, in the presence of the woman he loved — had nothing to do but take his leave; but he did it with three thoughts gnawing at his heart-his vanity was hurt, his dear Lenette was crying, and her husband was rebellious and insubordinate, and resisting his authority.

And as the Schulrath said farewell forever, a bitter, bitter sorrow stood fixed in the eyes of his beloved Lenette a sorrow which, though the hand of time has long since covered it over, I still see there in its fixity; and she could not go downstairs, as at other times, with her sorrowing friend, but went back into the dark, unlighted room, alone with her overflowing, breaking heart.

Firmian's heart laid aside its hardness, though not its coldness, at the sight of his persecuted wife in her dry, stony grief at this falling to ruin of every one of her little plans and joys; and he did not add to her sorrow by a single word of reproach. "You see," was all he said, "that it is no fault of mine that the Schulrath gives up our acquaintance; he ought never to have been told anything about the matter, however, it's all over now." She made no reply. The hornet's sting (which makes a triple stab), the dagger, thrown as by some revengeful Italian, was left sticking firm in her wound, which therefore could not

bleed. Ah! poor soul; thou hast deprived thyself of so much! Firmian, however, could not see that he had anything to accuse himself of; he being the gentlest, the most yielding of men under the sun, always ruffled all the feathers on his body up with a rustle in an instant at the slightest touch of compulsion, most especially if it concerned his honor. He would accept a present, it is true, but only from Leibgeber, or (on rare occasions) from others in the warmest hours of soul communion; and his friend and he both held the opinion that, in friendship, not only was a farthing of quite as much value as a sovereign, but that a sovereign was worth just as little as a farthing, and that one is bound to accept the most splendid presents just as readily as the most trifling; and hence he counted it among the unrecognized blessings of childhood that children can receive gifts without any feeling of shame.

In a mental torpor he now sat down in the armchair, and covered his eyes with his hand; and then the mists which hid the future all rolled away, and showed in it a wide dreary tract of country, full of the black ashy ruins of burnt homesteads, and of dead bushes of underwood, and the skeletons of beasts

lying in the sand. He saw that the chasm, or landslip, which had torn his heart and Lenette's asunder, would go on gaping wider and wider; he saw, oh! so clearly and cheerlessly, that his old beautiful love would never come back, that Lenette would never lay aside her self-willed pertinacity, her whims, the habits of her daily life; that the narrow limits of her heart and head would remain fixed firmly forever; that she would as little learn to understand him, as get to love him; while, again, her repugnance to him would get the greater the longer her friend's banishment endured, and that her fondness for the latter would increase in proportion. Stiefel's money, and his seriousness, and religion, and attachment to herself combined to tear in two the galling bond of wedlock by the pressure of a more complex and gentle tie. Sorrowfully did Siebenkæs gaze into a long prospect of dreary days, all constrained silence, and dumb hostility and complaint.

Lenette was working in her room in silence, for her wounded heart shrunk from a word or a look as from a cold fierce wind. It was now very dark, she wanted no light. On a sudden, a wandering street-singing woman began to play a harp, and her child to accompany her on a flute, somewhere in the house downstairs. At this our friend's bursting heart seemed to have

a thousand gashes inflicted on it to let it bleed gently away. As nightingales love to sing where there is an echo, so our hearts speak loudest to music. As these tones brought back to him his old hopes, almost irrecognizable now, -as he gazed down at his Arcadia now lying hidden deep, deep, beneath the stream of years, and saw himself down in it, with all his young fresh wishes, amid his long-lost friends, gazing with happy eyes round their circle, all confidence and trust, his growing heart hoarding and cherishing its love and truth for some warm heart yet to be met in the time to come; and as he now burst into that music with a dissonance, crying, "And I have never found that heart, and now all is past and over," and as the pitiless tones brought pictures of blossomy springs and flowery lands, and circles of loving friends to pass, as in a camera obscura, before him-him who had nothing, not one soul in all the land to love him; his steadfast spirit gave way at last, and sank down on earth to rest as quite overdone, and nothing soothed him now but that which pained. Suddenly this sleepwalking music ceased, and the pause clutched, like a speechless nightmare, tighter at his heart. In the silence he went into the room and said to Lenette, "Take them down what little we have left." But over the latter words his voice broke and failed, for he saw (by the flare of some potash burning which was going on opposite) that all her glowing face was covered with streaming, undried tears, though when he came in she pretended to be busily wiping the window pane dimmed by her breath. She laid the money down on the window. He said, more gently yet, "Lenette, you will have to take it to them now, or they will be gone.' She took it; her eyes worn with weeping met his (which were worn with weeping too); she went, and then their eyes grew well-nigh dry, so far apart were their two souls already.

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They were suffering in that terrible position of circumstances when not even a moment of mutual and reciprocal emotion can any longer reconcile and warm two hearts. His whole heart swelled with overflowing affection, but hers belonged to his no more; he was urged at once by the wish to love her, and the feeling that it was now impossible, by the perception of all her shortcomings and the conviction of her indifference to him. He sat down in the window seat, and leaned his head upon the sill, where it rested, as it chanced, upon a handkerchief which she had left there, and which was moist and cold with tears.

She had been solacing herself, after the long oppression of the day, with this gentle effusion, much as we have a vein opened after some severe contusion. When he touched the handkerchief, an icy shudder crept down his back, like a sting of conscience, but immediately after it there came a burning glow as the thought flashed to his mind that her weeping had been for another person than himself altogether. The singing and the flute now began again (without the harp this time), and floated in the rising, falling waves of a slow-timed song, of which the verses ended always with the words, "Gone is gone, and dead is dead." Sorrow now clutched him in her grasp, like some mantle fish, casting around him her dark and suffocating folds. He pressed Lenette's wet handkerchief to his eyes hard, and heard (but less distinctly), "Gone is gone, and dead is dead." Then of a sudden his whole soul melted and dissolved at the thought that perhaps that halting heart of his would let him see no other new year save that of the morrow, and he thought of himself as dying; and the cold handkerchief, wet with his own tears now as well as hers, lay cool upon his burning brow, while the notes of the music seemed to mark like bells each stroke of time, so that its rapid flight was made distinguishable by the ear, and he saw himself asleep in a quiet grave, like one in the Grotto of the Serpents, but with worms in place of the serpents, licking off the burning poison of life.

The music had ceased. He heard Lenette moving in the next room and getting a light; he went to her and gave her her handkerchief. But his heart was so pained and bleeding that he longed to embrace some one, no matter whom; he was impelled to press his Lenette to his heart, his Lenette of the past if not of the present, his suffering, if no longer his loving, Lenette; at the same time he could not utter one word of affection, neither had he the slightest wish to do so. He put his arms round her slowly, unbent, and held her to him, but she turned her head quickly and coldly away as from a kiss which was not proffered. This pained him greatly, and he said, "Do you suppose I am any happier than you are yourself?" He laid his face down on her averted head, pressed her to him again, and then let her away; and this vain embrace at an end, his heart cried, "Gone is gone, and dead is dead."

The silent room in which the music and the words had ceased to sound was like some unhappy village from whence the enemy has carried off all the bells, and where there is

nothing but silence all the day and night, and the church tower is mute as if time itself were past.

As Firmian laid him down on his bed, he thought, "A sleep closes the old year as if it were one's last, and ushers in the new as it does our own lives; and I sleep on towards a future all anxiety, vague of form, and darkly veiled. Thus does man sleep at the gate behind which the dreams are barred; but although his dreams are but a step or two-a minute or two within that gate, he cannot tell what dreams await him at its opening; whether in the brief, unconscious night beasts of prey with glaring eyes are lying in wait to dash upon him, or smiling children to come trooping round him in their play; nor if, when the cloudy shapes beyond that mystic door come about him, their clasp is to be the fond embrace of love or the murderous clutch of death."

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KUBLA KHAN.

BY SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE.

[SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE, English metaphysician and poet, was born October 21, 1772, at Ottery St. Mary; graduated at Jesus College, Cambridge, 1792. With Southey and others he formed a scheme of communism in foreign parts, to be called "Pantisocracy"; but remained in England for a literary life. After various wanderings and visits to other parts of Europe, in 1810 he settled permanently in London. His first volume of poems was in 1794; the "Ancient Mariner" formed part of the volume "Lyrical Ballads," chiefly Wordsworth's, in 1798; "Christabel" and "Kubla Khan" are the chief of the others. He edited The Friend in 1809. "Biographia Literaria," "Lay Sermons," "Aids to Reflection," and the posthumously collected "Table Talk” are his main prose works. He died July 25, 1834.]

IN XANADU did Kubla Khan

A stately pleasure-dome decree;
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man,
Down to a sunless sea.

So twice five miles of fertile ground

With walls and towers were girdled round,

And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills

Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree;

And here were forests ancient as the hills,

Infolding sunny spots of greenery.

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