ent crying it with a roar, and foreignly
beholding himself. He pelted himself with epithets; his worst enemies
could not have been handier in using them. From Alvan to Alvan, they
signified such an earthquake in a land of splendid structures as
shatters to dust the pride of the works of men. He was down among them,
lower than the herd, rolling in vulgar epithets that, attached to one
like him, became of monstrous distortion. O fool! dolt! blind ass!
tottering idiot! drunken masquerader! miserable Jack Knave, performing
suicide with that blessed coxcomb air of curling a lock!--Clotilde!
Clotilde! Where has one read the story of a man who had the jewel of
jewels in his hand, and flung in into the deeps, thinking that he flung
a pebble? Fish, fool, fish! and fish till Doomsday! There's nothing but
your fool's face in the water to be got to bite at the bait you throw,
fool! Fish for the flung-away beauty, and hook your shadow of a Bottom's
head! What impious villain was it refused the gift of the gods, that he
might have it bestowed on him according to his own prescription of the
ceremonies! They laugh! By Orcus! how they laugh! The laughter of the
gods is the lightning of death's irony over mortals. Can they have a
finer subject than a giant gone fool?

Tears burst from him: tears of rage, regret, selflashing. O for
yesterday! He called aloud for the recovery of yesterday, bellowed,
groaned. A giant at war with pigmies, having nought but their weapons,
having to fight them on his knees, to fight them with the right hand
while smiting himself with the left, has too much upon him to keep his
private dignity in order. He was the same in his letters--a Cyclops
hurling rocks and raising the seas to shipwreck. Dignity was cast off;
he came out naked. Letters to Clotilde, and to the baroness, to the
friend nearest him just then, Colonel von Tresten, calling them to him,
were dashed to paper in this naked frenzy, and he could rave with all
the truth of life, that to have acted the idiot, more than the loss of
the woman, was the ground of his anguish. Each antecedent of his career
had been a step of strength and success departed. The woman was but a
fragment of the tremendous wreck; the woman was utterly diminutive,
yet she was the key of the reconstruction; the woman won, he would be
himself once more: and feeling that, his passion for her swelled to full
tide and she became a towering splendour whereat his eyeballs ached, she
bec