arching over a shoreless and bottomless sea!
He had long followed the glittering yet fleeting traces left by the
meteors through the blue depths of space; he had tracked the mystic and
incalculable orbits of the comets as they flash through their wandering
paths, solitary and incomprehensible, everywhere dreaded for their
ominous splendor, yet inoffensive and harmless. He had gazed upon the
shining of that distant star, Aldebaran, which, like the glitter and
sullen glow in the eye of a vengeful enemy, glares fiercely upon our
globe, without daring to approach it. He had watched the radiant planets
shedding upon the restless eye which seeks them a consoling and friendly
light, like the weird cabala of an enigmatic yet hopeful promise.

Heine had seen all these things, under the varying appearances which
they assume in different latitudes; he had seen much more also with
which he would entertain us under strange similitudes. He had assisted
at the furious cavalcade of "Herodiade;" he had also an entrance at the
court of the king of "Aulnes" in the gardens of the "Hesperides"; and
indeed into all those places inaccessible to mortals who have not had
a fairy as godmother, who would take upon herself the task of
counterbalancing all the evil experienced in life, by showering upon the
adopted the whole store of fairy treasures.

Upon that evening which we are now describing, Meyerbeer was seated
next to Heine;--Meyerbeer, for whom the whole catalogue of admiring
interjections has long since been exhausted! Creator of Cyclopean
harmonics as he was, he passed the time in delight when following the
detailed arabesques, which, woven in transparent gauze, wound in filmy
veils around the delicate conceptions of Chopin.

Adolphe Nourrit, a noble artist, at once ascetic and passionate, was
also there. He was a sincere, almost a devout Catholic, dreaming of the
future with the fervor of the Middle Ages, who, during the latter part
of his life, refused the assistance of his talent to any scene of
merely superficial sentiment. He served Art with a high and enthusiastic
respect; he considered it, in all its divers manifestations, only a
holy tabernacle, "the Beauty of which formed the splendor of the True."
Already undermined by a melancholy passion for the Beautiful, his brow
seemed to be turning into stone under the dominion of this haunting
feeling: a feeling always explained by the outbreak of despair, too late
for remedy from man