ke from his revery.

The door opened, and the keeper of the sad abode (a surgeon of humanity
and eminence) entered, followed by De Montaigne. Cesarini turned
round and scowled upon the latter; the surgeon, after a few words of
salutation, withdrew to a corner of the room, and appeared absorbed in
a book. De Montaigne approached his brother-in-law,--"I have brought
you some poems just published at Milan, my dear Castruccio,--they will
please you."

"Give me my liberty!" cried Cesarini, clenching his hands. "Why am I
to be detained here? Why are my nights to be broken by the groans of
maniacs, and my days devoured in a solitude that loathes the aspect of
things around me? Am I mad? You know I am not! It is an old trick to
say that poets are mad,--you mistake our agonies for insanity. See, I
am calm; I can reason: give me any test of sound mind--no matter how
rigid--I will pass it; I am not mad,--I swear I am not!"

"No, my dear Castruccio," said De Montaigne, soothingly; "but you are
still unwell,--you still have fever; when next I see you perhaps you
may be recovered sufficiently to dismiss the doctor and change the air.
Meanwhile is there anything you would have added or altered?"

Cesarini had listened to this speech with a mocking sarcasm on his lip,
but an expression of such hopeless wretchedness in his eyes, as they
alone can comprehend who have witnessed madness in its lucid intervals.
He sank down, and his head drooped gloomily on his breast. "No," said
he; "I want nothing but free air or death,--no matter which."

De Montaigne stayed some time with the unhappy man, and sought to soothe
him; but it was in vain. Yet when he rose to depart, Cesarini started
up, and fixing on him his large wistful eyes, exclaimed, "Ah! do not
leave me yet. It is so dreadful to be alone with the dead and the worse
than dead!"

The Frenchman turned aside to wipe his eyes, and stifle the rising at
his heart; and again he sat, and again he sought to soothe. At length
Cesarini, seemingly more calm, gave him leave to depart. "Go," said he,
"go; tell Teresa I am better, that I love her tenderly, that I shall
live to tell her children not to be poets. Stay, you asked if there was
aught I wished changed: yes, this room; it is too still: I hear my own
pulse beat so loudly in the silence, it is horrible! There is a room
below, by the window of which there is a tree, and the winds rock its
boughs to and fro, and it sighs and groans like a